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IN 



RUSSIA. 

COL. CHARLES A. de ARNAUD, 

Author of Ancient and Modem Philosophy, In Defense of Russia, The 
Union and Its Ally Russia, Etc., Etc., Etc. 



"The defeat of the Decembrists was the signal for a new era in 
Russia, which placed her in the van of progress and civilization." 

Gambetta. 



New York : 

J. S. OGILVIE, PUBLISHER, 

57 Rose Street. 



No. 41. 






TWENTY-FIVE 
1 - - SERMONS 



cntr 



The Holy Land. 



■BT- 



Rev, T. De Witt Talmage, D.D. 



No Series of Sermons ever delivered by this 
famous preacher has created such a widespread and 
intense interest as this. These Sermons describe with 
vivid interest the scenes, incidents and many various 
experiences met with in the Holy Land, the land in 
which people are now more interested than ever 
before. 

Among- the hundreds of thousands of people who 
have read the utterances of this wonderfully success- 
ful preacher there are none hut will be glad to have 
this book. Read the following 

TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

1. Eve of Departure— 2. I Must also See Rome — 8 A Med- 
iterranean Voyage — 4. Paul's Mission in Athens — 5. Life and 
Death of Dorcas— 6. The Glory of Solomon's Reign — 7. Peace, 
Be Still— 8. The Marriage Feast— 9. Christmas Eve in the Holy 
Land — 10. The Joyful Surprise— 11. How a King's Liff was 
Saved— 12. The Phiiippian Earthquake— 13. What is in a Name? 
—14. The Half was not Told Me.— 15. I Went Up to Jerusalem. 
—16. On Ihe Housetop in Jerusalem — 17. The Journey to Jeri- 
cho — 18. He Toucheth the Hills and They Smoke — 19. Solomon 
in all His Glory — 20. The Journey to Bethel — 21. Incidents in 
Palestine — 22. Among the Holy Hills.— 23. Our Sail on Lake 
Galilee— 24. On to Damascus— 25. Across Mount Lebanon. 

It contains 320 pages in paper cover, and will be 
sent by mail, postpaid, to any address on receipt of 25 
cents. Bound in Cloth, $1.50; Half Russia, $2.00. 
Agents wanted. Address all orders to 

J. S. OGILVIE, Publisher, 

57 Rose Street, New York. 



ESPOpinions of Prominent Men.cjgi 



The following criticisms have already been re- 
ceived on this work, and we ask that you give it a 
careful reading and do what you can to give it a 
wide circulation. 

Senator JOHN SHERMAN Says of It : 

Senate Chamber, Washington, December 24, 1890. 

Mr. Charles A. de Arnatjd. 

My Dear Sir: I did not acknowledge the receipt of your 
book, "A New Era in Russia," until I was able, in the hurry of 
the session, to read it, which I have done with great pleasure 
and satisfaction. I confess that your book gives me new ideas 
upon the subject, and presents the question of banishment to 
Siberia in a very different light from what I had gathered from 
other sources. With thanks for your courtesy, I am, 

Very truly yours, 

John Sherman. 

Hon. WHARTON BARKER Says of It : 

Philadelphia, Pa., December 28, 1890. 

Col. Chas. A. de Arnaud. 

Dear Sir: Please accept my thanks for the copy of "The 
New Era in Russia " which you sent me. I have read your book 
with a great deal of interest and pleasure. I have been in Rus- 
sia during the past twelve years several times. I have met many 
prominent men, and discussed with them the political position 
of Russia in relation to her own people and outside nations and 
people. I thank you again for the copy of your book, which 
will serve the people of this country and Russia well. I beg to 
say that I believe and have faith in Russia and her people. 
Yours very truly, 

Wharton Barker. 



Hon. CASSIUS M. CLAY Says : 

"Whitehall, Ky., February 15, 1891. 

Col. Chas. A. deArnaud. 

Dear Sir: I read your book, "The New Era in Russia," with 
great interest. You deserve a great deal of credit for defending 
so great and noble a people and government. 
Yours very truly, 

Cassius M. Clay. 

Hon. JAMES F. WILSON Says of It : 

Senate Chamber, Washington, D. C, Jan. 1, 1891. 

Col. Charles A. de Arnaud. 

My Dear Sir : I received the copy of "The New Era in 
Russia" which you were kind enough to send me. I give you 
my sincere thanks for your courtesy. I have read the book with 
great interest, and it has given me, I believe, a better under- 
standing of the Russian question. I wish the book could be 
read extensively by our people. 

Yours truly, 

James F. Wilson. 

J. H. MORGAN, Esq., the well-known critic and reviewer, 
writes as follows : 

Dennison, Ohio, December 16, 1890. 

My Dear Professsor : I wish to thank you for a copy of Col. 
de Arnaud's "New Era in Russia." I have read it with greater 
interest than I usually devote to such things, for the reason that 
it sets forth in a clear light for the first time — so far as I know — 
the true meaning of much that has long been mysterious. The 
stories of Russian barbarism, circulated from the time of Peter 
the Great, have impressed the mind of our people with a fearful 
idea of the Czars and their subjects. We have been so long taught 
to regard the entire Empire as a sort of Asiatic monstrosity un- 
naturally transplanted to Europe, that the existence of such a 
thing as a respectable Russian people is almost beyond our belief. 
The Emperors and Empresses bear a terrible character in popu- 
lar imagination— in their private life rivaling Caligula and 
Messalina, and in public ambition surpassing the great Napoleon 
himself. The business followed by these rulers is commonly un- 



derstood to be, first, the suppression by knout and banishment to 
Siberia of everything- like freedom of thought, and, secondly, the 
progressive conquest of Southern Europe and all Asia. 

What good they could expect to find in the former of these 
objects nobody has explained. Why an intelligent monarch 
should wish and strive to make and keep his subjects mere brutes, 
I could never understand. But still less could I imagine how 
even a brutish population could endure such an atmosphere of 
hell as we have been taught to believe overhangs that entire 
country. The fact is, the Russians have made vast progress 
within two or three generations. Their armies, their ships, their 
cities, their literature, and, most of all, their tremendous expan- 
sion and mastery Eastward, all belong essentially to a great and 
moving people. A swinish and tigerish despotism could not pos- 
sibly be consistent with such phenomena. 

To my mind this work furnishes a remarkably clear state- 
ment of facts either totally unknown or grossly misunderstood 
by the mass of our people. The true meaning of Nihilism is 
made so plain that few persons after reading this account will 
waste sympathy with that association of criminal maniacs. 
The murder of the late Czar, in view of his service in abolishing 
the ruinous and shameful system of serfage, has hitherto been 
a matter of astonishment to me. I now recognize in it a repeti- 
tion of the old Roman Senatorial massacres, the object of which 
was to keep the Commonwealth in the hands of a gang of re- 
morseless petty despots. You remember how the Senators par- 
celled out the lands of Italy among themselves, and filled their 
estates with Asiatic slaves. Whoever raised objection was 
marked for butchery. 

Of course, well-informed men have some time been aware 
that Siberia is not a mere icy wilderness — although much of it 
cannot be considered habitable by civilized people. It is grati- 
fying to know that the exiles from European Russia are not 
sent to be frozen along the shores of the dreary Polar Ocean. 
The popular idea on that subject has been greatly modified by 
recent accounts ; and this brief work of Col. de Arnaud will 
give a new and bright illumination to the entire question. The 
removal of criminals from the mass of European population by 
exportation to a distant region is no new or cruel scheme. It is 
better than the penitentiary system in every point. The pre- 
servation and peace of society demands some kind of removal 
of felons, and we are forced to choose between Draco and Solon 

The question of persecution of Jews is more serious, because 



so easily misrepresented. An obstinate criminal excites no 
great sympathy ; but the spectacle of peaceful Hebrews at- 
tacked and driven from home for no conceivable reason except 
" race jealousy " is calculated to arouse deep feeling. That the 
present Czar would be guilty of anything so illogical and 
irrational is beyond belief. The Russian Government is one, 
not of popular prejudice or mob-impulse, but of distinct, well 
considered purposes. There could be no earthly purpose in per- 
secuting so prominent a race as the Jews. The story is on its 
face enormously improbable. It is evidently from the workshop 
of British Tory politicians. You know my opinion of them — 
that they are the champion liars — the most malignant, im- 
pudent and criminal liars of modern times. 

The literary style of " The New Era in Russia " is unusually 
fine. Although suffering with some trouble in my eyes, I read 
it through with that peculiar pleasure which good work always 
affords me. I was sorry to reach the end, and did so with anew 
understanding of the subject. The argument, although not 
made heavy and tiresome by labored formality, is singularly 
clear and convincing. From first to last I found nothing which 
I did not recognize as in agreement with all the facts already in 
my knowledge. Every position is fully established by irresis- 
tible evidence. The only fault I have to find is that so interest- 
ing a work is not longer. 

Again thanking you for the benefit and gratification I have 
enjoyed, I remain, very truly, 

G. H. Morgan. 



THE NEW ERA 



IN 



. RUSSIA. 



/ 



COL. CHARLES A. de ARNAUD, 

Author of Ancient and Modern Philosophy, In Defense of Russia, The 
Union and Its Ally Russia, Etc., Etc., Etc. 



" The defeat of the Decembrists was the signal for a new era in 
RUSSIA, which placed her in the van of progress and civilization." 

Gambetta. 



Copyright, 1891, by J. S. Ogilvie. 



THE PEERLESS SERIES, No. 41. Issued Monthly. May, 1891. $3 per year. Entcsred at Now York 
Poet-Office as second-class matter. Copyright, by J. S. Ogilvie. 



New York: 

J. S. OGILVIE, PUBLISHER, 

57 Rose Street. 



39 
J) 3 



CONTENTS. 



Page. 

Chapter I.— Emperor Alexander I. and the Decembrists . 11 

Chapter II. — The Eeign of the Emperor Nicholas . . 23 
Chapter III. — Emperor Alexander II. and the Emancipa- 
tion of the Serfs 28 

Chaptek IV. — The Reign of Emperor Alexander III. and 
the grandeur of the Russian Empire under his wise 

National Policy . . . U 39 

Chapter V.— The Origin of Nihilism . . • . . 44 

Chapter VI. — The Administrative Process and " Politicals " 48 

Chapter VII. — Siberia 55 

Chapter VEIL— Poland 78 

Chapter IX. — Stepniak and the Persecution of the Jews 84 
Chapter X. — The "Propagandists" in Russia. — The Stu- 
dent's Assassination. — Central Nihilistic Committee. — 
Count Leo Tolstoi, etc . . . . . . .100 



PREFACE. 



Ik the appended volume 1 have very briefly, but 1 think 
fully, exhibited the progress of Eussia at every step from 
the accession of Alexander I. to the present year of the 
reign of Alexander III. A clear understanding 'of the 
political progress of Russia and the existing condition of 
that Empire could not be had without such historical retro- 
spect. I have shown the difficulties with which the last 
four Emperors had to contend in the maintenance of their 
fixed policy of giving freedom to the people, and a firm, 
liberal, progressive government to the country. I have 
shown that all the internal disturbances within the Empire 
arose from the conflicts of the nobles or reactionary class 
in opposing the steadfast policy of the Emperors in favor 
of liberal and popular measures, and that the sympathy 
expressed by the English-speaking public everywhere for 
this reactionary class was altogether a mistaken sympathy, 
being given to the partisans of absolutism instead of to the 
Emperors, the champions of popular and national liberty. 

The facts 1 have here set forth can not be refuted or 
controverted. They are matters of record. 

Every candid, intelligent man will, I am sure, on read- 
ing this little work, see that the "Nihilists" of Russia 
were not true patriots, but at the best were actuated by very 



X PREFACE. 

unpatriotic motives; and that the stories about Eussian 
cruelty to " Siberian exiles " are literally without founda- 
tion, except, perhaps, in isolated cases, such as occur in 
the administration of the criminal law of every country. 

The object of the work is to give to intelligent readers 
everywhere a truthful picture of Russian government, laws, 
and progress, and to throw some light upon the internal 
economy of a people who are really less known to their 
western neighbors than any other civilized nation. 

With this brief announcement of the object and scope of 
" The New Era in Bussia," 1 commend it to the attention 
of the American nation, confident that a people at once so 
intelligent and so just will not fail to give the facts therein 
set forth an impartial consideration. 



THE NEW ERA IN EUSSIA. 



CHAPTEE I. 

Alexander 1. and the Decembrists. 

Few events in history have been so little understood, yet 
so greatly misrepresented, as the famous December insur- 
rection of 1825 in the city of St. Petersburg — an incident 
whose momentous results challenge the admiration and 
startle the imagination of the student. Much has been 
said and written about the Decembrists by sensational maga- 
zine-writers and lecturers in this country; but the state- 
ments of fact they make are] erroneous, and the conclu- 
sions that they deduce are grossly untrue. The 
'* Decembrists " have been cited as patriots, inspired by a 
love of constitutional liberty, and actuated by a desire to 
place Eussia in the van of modern progress while the suc- 
cessful " stamping out " of their movement has been char- 
acterized as a triumph of despotism over freedom and a re- 
trogression from modern civilization to the semi-barbarism 
of the Dark Ages. Nothing could be falser than this 
view. The very reverse, indeed, is the truth. The defeat 



12 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

of the Decembrists was the victory of modern progress and 
enlightened advancement over serfdom and feudalism, and 
the failure of their insurrection was the signal for the on- 
ward march of civilization over the retreating and vanish- 
ing wrecks of barbarism. No sketch of the Russian 
nation, its character as a people, the genius of its institu- 
tions, the spirit of its laws, can be considered complete 
without a clear understanding of the origin of the Decem- 
ber insurrection of 1825, of the motives of the insurrection- 
ists, and of the avowed object of their purpose to overthrow 
the existing government of Russia and the substitution in 
its stead of their own revolutionary, retrogressive, and 
despotic polity. It would seem that in America only dis- 
torted facts about the Decembrists have been circulated, 
and that all the information given to the people of this 
country is misinformation. I propose in the following 
introduction to the accompanying work to tell the true 
story of the Decembrists, and to show that the failure of 
their insurrection was the dawning of a new era for Rus- 
sia — the event which placed that great Empire at once in 
the van of nations, which gave impetus to the gigantic 
strides with which she has advanced toward the pinnacle 
of both material and moral grandeur, and which has en- 
abled her to dictate the policy and to control the destiny 
of Europe. 

For there are two distinct epochs in the history of mod- 
ern Russia, which challenge the most thoughtful consider- 
ation of the student, and without a full comprehension 
of which the history of Russia, from the stand-point 
of the statesman, is inexplicable and incomprehensible. 



THE NEW EKA IN" RUSSIA. 13 

The first of these was the reign of Peter the Great, and the 
consequent birth of Russia into the family of modern na- 
tions. From the accession of Peter to the reign of Alex- 
ander I. (a little less than a hundred years), the progress 
of Russia reads like a page out of an Eastern romance, 
dazzling the judgment by the amazing rapidity of her 
progress, and captivating the fancy by the splendid mag- 
nificence of her development. In less than a hundred 
years this semi-barbarous congeries of peoples was consoli- 
dated into a compact, magnificent, irresistible Empire, 
filling all Europe with the shadow of her greatness .and 
altering forever the long-cherished plans of Western Euro- 
pean kingcraft. Gigantic and powerful as she was, how- 
ever, there were elements of weakness in her bosom and a 
spirit of reaction in certain classes of her people, which, to 
the discerning eyes of her shrewdest and best statesmen, 
boded no future good to either the Russian Government or 
to the Russian people. These elements of weakness were 
the serfdom which enchained the great bulk of her popula- 
tion — this spirit of reaction was the distinguishing charac- 
teristic of certain classes of her turbulent nobility who 
burned with an ardent desire to perpetuate the hardest 
features of that feudalism which the rest of Europe at that 
time was preparing to cast off and forever abandon. 

It was at this time, very luckily for Russia, that so able, 
so wise, so liberal a monarch as Alexander I. came to the 
throne. This great ruler deserves the title of " Great," 
for great he was in all the elements that go to make up not 
only the monarch, but the man. With liberal ideas far in 
advance of his time, with the broadest of mental culture, 



14 THE NEW EEA IN" RUSSIA. 

with a depth and breadth of intellectual resource for which 
even those who knew him best have not given him suffi- 
cient credit, Alexander 1. sought to make his country en- 
d uringly strong and his people intelligently prosperous and 
happy. The Napoleonic wars for a time prevented the 
practical application of the far-sighted policy he had con- 
ceived, but after returning from Paris with his victorious 
army, at the conclusion of a campaign where Eussian arms 
and Eussian diplomacy had given peace to a long and 
sorely vexed world, he found time to elaborate his great 
and wise scheme of internal polity. 

This polity, briefly stated, embraced three cardinal feat- 
ures. These were, first, the emancipation of his people 
from the evils of serfdom; secondly, the education of the 
masses so as to prepare them for an intelligent reception 
and just appreciation of their freedom, and, thirdly, a re- 
modeling of the jurisprudence of Eussia. 

One of Alexander's most trusted friends and coadjutors 
in the work of reform was a civil officer named Nicolas 
Tourgueneff, who had spent much time in traveling over 
Europe studying the various systems of government in ex- 
istence there and noting their operations. On his return' 
to Eussia he laid before the Emperor a carefully elaborated 
report of his observations, with suggestions for reforms in 
Eussian finance and a well-digested plan for the education 
of the masses, all based upon the primary policy of eman- 
cipation, in which he was an ardent sympathizer with the 
Emperor. The latter approved TourguenefE's plans. Mr. 
Tourgueneff then, as the next step toward the practical 
application of these plans, proceeded to enlist the sympa- 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 15 

thies and the co-operation of some of the powerful nobility 
of the Empire. To this end he unfolded his ideas to 
Prince Sergius Troubetskoy. The prince seemed to heart- 
ily endorse a scheme of reform, and in furtherance thereof 
offered the aid of the well-known literary society of which 
he was president. This society was known as " Union du 
bien publique," or " Society for the Public Good." The 
constitution framed for the Society was submitted to the 
consideration of Tourgueneff. The latter had no sooner 
examined it than he exclaimed, " My God, gentlemen, this 
is neither my idea nor the Emperor's! We propose, first, 
to set an example to the nobles of Russia by emancipating 
our serfs, hopeful that they will imitate the example thus 
set; and, secondly, to educate these serfs. We do not pro- 
pose merely to confine education to certain classes of no- 
bility. 1 myself, gentlemen, will set you an example I 
trust you will follow. Here are the documents providing 
for the emancipation of my serfs. Imitate me in this re- 
spect." 

But the young nobles of the Society du bien publique 
had no such intentions. A violent storm of indignation 
greeted his liberal and partiotic utterances. They held a 
meeting and at once expelled Mr. Tourgueneff, for what 
they styled his " treasonable expressions," expressions they 
denounced as the utterances of a purpose to rob them of 
their property in serfs, and to curtail the prerogatives they 
enjoyed as members of tl^e nobility. It is pertinent here 
to say that this So^ety was composed almost, if not quite 
exclusively, of the younger officers of the Imperial Guards, 
sons of landed proprietors, jealous of the prerogatives 



16 THE NEW EEA IN ETJSSIA. 

which through many years had been enjoyed by them 
through virtue of this nobility. * 

The expulsion of Tourgueneff did not satisfy these re- 
actionists. They went further. They framed a constitu- 
tion intended to apply to the whole Empire. A very brief 
synopsis of this constitution will show that these men were 
not friends of constitutional freedom, or of supplanting a 
monarchy by a republic; but that they wished to secure 
for themselves the privileges of the darkest days of feudal- 
ism, while the mass of the people, the special objects of 
the Emperor's care, were to be sunk to the lowest condi- 
tion of hopeless slavery. The proposed constitution con- 
tained five articles: First, the sovereign executive power 
was to be lodged in the hands of the Emperor; secondly, 
a council and senate were to be organized, the electors of 
which were to be confined to land-owners and nobles posses- 
sing property in serfs; thirdly, the members of said council 
and senate were to be confined exclusively to the nobility — 
fourthly, serfdom was to be made perpetual; fifthly, State 
education was to be confined exclusively to the nobility; no 
member of the bourgeois class, no serf, and no Jew was 
ever to enjoy any of the benefits of education. 

It will be seen that the constitution, prepared by the 
members of this Society, afterward known as the " De- 
cembrists," recognized only the nobles as the people of 

* Letter of Troubetskoy to Obalenskoi. 
" Tourgueneff proposed to the Society to-day to publish a maga- 
zine in furtherance of his cranky idea of emancipation of serfs. 
We, however, disposed of him by prohibiting his further attendance 
upon our meetings or taking further part in our proceedings." 



THE NEW EEA IN" RUSSIA. 17 

Russia. All other classes were only so many cattle, with 
no privileges or rights that a noble was bound to re- 
spect! 

The Society grew very rapidly, and through its ramifica- 
tions permeated the Capital. It was, however, confined 
almost exclusively to St. Petersburg. With a lack of judg- 
ment that seems simple fatuity, with an excess of confi- 
dence in their own strength bordering on the idiotic, the 
" Decembrists " freely plunged into treason. Their ulti- 
mate object, at last boldly avowed, was the assassination 
of the ^Emperor Alexander. His liberal views, and, above 
all, his intense desire for the emancipation of the serfs, 
were held by them to be crimes justifying assassination. 
His successor, according to their programme, was to be his 
brother Constantine, a man of dissolute habits and still 
more dissolute associations, a reactionist of the most pro- 
nounced character, an ardent and unscrupulous enemy to 
all schemes of emancipation. Constantine was a born des- 
pot, and his marriage with the daughter of a Polish noble, 
by teaching him that the Polish nobles regard their fellow- 
Poles of lower degree as merely a herd of cattle, personal 
chattels, had intensified his objections to the application 
of liberal ideas in the Russian Government. Alexander 
was well aware of all these conditions. He was aware, too, 
that conspiracies were being frequently formed to effect 
his murder. He saw that if such plots should be success- 
ful and Constantine be raised to the throne, then his en- 
thusiastic dream of freedom 'and education for the masses 
would be rudely and ruthlessly swept away; that Russia 
would become a dreary desert of despotism, and the condi- 



18 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

tion of the masses be one of intolerable wretchedness and 
despair. The reign of Oonstantine meant a sudden and 
severe, perhaps a final, check to the advancement and 
prosperity of Eussia. He therefore resolved upon a course 
of action which he executed wisely, promptly, decisively. 
He compelled Oonstantine to sign a paper renouncing all 
claim to the Eussian throne in favor of Nicholas, a young- 
er brother of the Emperor. Nicholas, afterward the 
" Iron Emperor," was a man of correct habits and in full 
sympathy with Alexander's great schemes for the advance- 
ment of the Empire, the emancipation of the serf s, and the 
welfare of the people. With both Alexander and Nicholas 
it was a cardinal point of faith that emancipation was the 
essential primary step toward the material and moral de- 
velopment of the Empire. 

It was while affairs were in this condition in 1825 that 
Alexander went on a visit to the Crimea, and there sick- 
ened and died. When this information reached St. Peters- 
burg it was received with immense enthusiasm by the 
" Society du bien publique," which immediately raised the 
shout of " Oonstantine and Constitution." The ignorant 
rabble, whom they had seduced into following them, reit- 
erated the shout, but, too ignorant to understand what 
" constitution " meant, and deceived by its similarity of 
sound, confined themselves to shouting for " Oonstantine " 
only. 

A great surprise met the Decembrists when the will of 
Alexander I. was read. It was not Oonstantine (who had 
renounced all pretentions or rights to the crown), but 
Nicholas, who was Alexander's successor. This put to 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 19 

flight the last vestige of common-sense that had been left 
the conspirators. They immediately organized a plan of 
action that appertains rather to the savage than to the civi- 
lized man. Composed as they were almost exclusively of 
nobles belonging to the army, they raised the standard of 
revolt. The senate had announced Nicholas as the legiti- 
mate successor of Alexander, and that monarch was energet- 
ically taking the preliminary steps in assertion of his rights. 
Oonstantine at this time was in Poland. The conspirators 
rushed to the barracks and told their men that to take the 
oath of allegiance to Nicholas was treason to Constantine. 
The latter, they declared, was coming at the head of a 
large army by forced marches from Poland, and his arrival 
at the Capital, with an overwhelming force, was to be 
speedily expected. Nor was this attempt at stirring up 
sedition in the army stationed at the Capital their only ac- 
tion. Various measures, some of the most savage charac- 
ter, were adopted to inflame the populace into riot and in- 
surrection. All the liquor shops in the city were given up 
to the rabble, and St. Petersburg, for the moment, seemed 
to be in the hands of fiends. Orders were issued permit- 
ting, nay, directing, the pillage of all the shops and stores 
in the city. In short, it was pandemonium on a large 
scale for a brief period of time. 

These are the men who have been lately cited in this 
country as examples of heroic patriots struggling against 
odds to rescue the perishing liberties of their country from 
the hands of a relentless tyrant! A pitiable travesty on 
the truth. For it was the slavery, not the freedom, of the 
people they wanted, and they began their insurrection by 



20 THE NEW EEA IN RUSSIA. 

wantonly turning over the property of their fellow-country- 
men to pillage and plunder. 

The churches too were marked for pillage, and the 
drunken rabble were not only invited but urged to pollute 
and desecrate the sacred sanctuaries of religion. With 
such a chaos prevailing in the city they calculated it would 
be easy, with their deluded army, to seize and kill Nich- 
olas, and, having proclaimed Constantine, to thus effectu- 
ally put down a demoralized resistance. 

A bolder man than Nicholas 1. of Eussia never lived. 
As soon as he learned of these things he went to the Senate 
Chamber and called on the Senators and the army to take 
the oath of allegiance to him. Then taking to his aid the 
famous soldier, General Milarodowitz, who had harassed 
the flying columns of the great Napoleon on his retreat 
from Eussia, he hastily conceived and sketched a plan to 
bring the loyal army to the Capital by forced marches. 
He then boldly confronted the insurgents. Eealizing the 
danger, but desiring to see if wiser counsels might not pre- 
vail, the veteran Milarodowitz tried remonstrance with the 
insurgents before using force. They would not listen, but 
brutally shot the old hero dead even while he was offering 
peace. This of course ended all attempts at reconciliation, 
except that of the rifle and the cannon. The Emperor 
immediately hurled his troops against the insurgents. 
Great lzaak Square, the scene of the principal conflict, 
was soon covered with the dead and dying, and blood 
flowed like water. The drunken rabble of the conspira- 
tors, the deluded soldiers, the arch-conspirators themselves* 
were soon overwhelmed and mercilessly routed. In a few 



THE NEW EKA IN RUSSIA. 21 

minutes the insurrection was over; and then on that De- 
cember day, in a chrysm of blood and fire, was born a new 
and a glorious era for Kussia. Standing by the bloody 
bier of the reactionary and barbaric past, which was dead 
beyond resurrection and buried forever amid the debris of 
its own ruins, the new Russia — the Eussia of law, order, 
development, and freedom was there ushered into existence 
and began that wonderful career of progress and grandeur 
which has had no equal in the past, and which promises to 
find no rival in the future. 

This was the insurrection of December, 1825, and these 
were the Decembrists, apostles of feudal slavery, disciples 
of despotism and barbarism, whom ignorant magazine- 
writers and public lecturers in this country have tried to 
magnify into patriots and martyrs. They were, really, as- 
sassins, plunderers, traitors, despoilers of churches, barba- 
rians, striving to rebuild upon the fair pedestal of the pres- 
ent the ruined and crumbling edifices of the past. Con- 
ceived in treason and nurtured by wrong they passed away 
in blood and fire, sealing by their destruction the assurance 
that freedom and law and progress were henceforth the 
birthright, acknowledged and inalienable, of the great Rus- 
sian Empire. 

The " Decembrists " were not men to whom is justly 
due the sympathy of Americans, or of friends of liberty in 
any land. They really and richly deserve the execration 
of mankind, especially of all lovers of freedom. But when 
we examine into the after-fate of these conspirators against 
law, order, morality, and liberty, we shall find that the 
Government they tried to overthrow was more lenient to 



22 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

them than their crimes merited, more lenient than Eng- 
land or the United States have been to traitors and mur- 
derers caught red-handed in the act. Of the Decembrists, 
of the principal ones, five who survived and were captured 
after the battle were condemned to be shot and one hun- 
dred and sixteen were banished to Siberia.* The Govern- 
ment they sought to overthrow justified its civilization by 
not taking bloody vengeance on their efforts to convert it 
into a reactionary and despotic barbarism. 

* In regard to the treatment of these prisoners in Siberia, I refer 
to the letter of Mr. George Kennan, page 68. 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 23 



CHAPTER II. 

The Reign of the Emperor Nicholas. 

It was fortunate for Russia that the wise and liberal 
Alexander I. should be succeeded by a sovereign of such 
firmness of determination and of such great executive abil- 
ity as Nicholas, one moreover in such hearty accord with 
the progressive and patriotic views of Alexander. The 
times required a strong hand and a wise head at the helm 
of State, and in Nicholas these were found united in per- 
fection. His reign was a stirring and eventful epoch in 
the history of the progress and development of the Russian 
Empire. True to the policy of Alexander, Nicholas was 
always equal to the occasion. His first action as Emperor, 
after thoroughly crushing out the Decembrist insurrection, 
was to reorganize the whole system of the Government, 
both civil and military. With the foresight of a great 
ruler and with the address of a great diplomatist, of both 
of which characters Nicholas was concededly in the first 
rank, he inaugurated a policy wherein obedience to law 
was the first and last great essential. Such a policy, when 
fairly understood, can not but be admired by Americans, 
for they, of all people, know that it is the real and the sole 
source of power in a nation and the indispensable and ini- 
tial step toward the attainment of moral and material 
grandeur. The difficulties that beset his every step in ex- 
ecuting this policy were almost insuperable and would have 
foiled any man less strong and wise than Nicholas. He 



24 THE NEW ERA. IN RUSSIA. 

found at the outset a great stumbling-block, which he 
strenuously exerted himself to remove, and thoroughly 
succeeded. This was 'the power the nobles "claimed and 
exercised over the serfs. The serf had been taught that 
there was no power equal to that of his master; that his 
fidelity as a slave and his loyalty as a subject were due only 
to his owner. The latter in many cases had the power of 
life and death over the serf, and the custom of the Empire 
justified the exercise of such a domination. All the offices 
of the Empire, both civil and military, were held by the 
nobles. Under such conditions it was exceedingly difficult 
for the Sovereign Executive power to reach the masses di- 
rectly. To do this Nicholas organized a strong bureau- 
cracy in every part of the Empire, whose chiefs were not 
confined to the noble classes, but were taken from the 
middle classes and were held strictly responsible for the 
acts of their subordinates. Each of these officials — chiefs 
of divisions we may term them — received inflexible instruc- 
tions to see that the law was held supreme over all; that 
its operation was equally strict upon peasant and prince 
alike, and that the higher the station the greater was the 
responsibility in obeying the law. So thoroughly was this 
idea carried out in practice that it soon became a proverb 
throughout the rest of Europe that in Russia a noble was 
more severely punished than a peasant for any infraction 
of law. 

As I have stated, the chief and ultimate object of the 
Emperor Nicholas, as it had been that of Alexander I. 
was the emancipation of the serfs and the diffusion of edu- 
cation among them. This policy met, of course, with the 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 25 

most intense antagonism from the nobles, who were un- 
alterably pro-slavery. Their pecuniary interests, their 
pride of caste, their traditions, were all wrapped up in and 
dependent on the continuance of serfdom. In order to 
overcome the hostility of the serf -owners and to reach the 
serfs themselves, it was necessary to teach both classes that 
the Emperor was superior to the master and that the Cen- 
tral Government controlled the local magnate. It was 
necessary to inculcate the idea that the serf as well as his 
owners owed allegiance, supreme, final, and. unquestiona- 
ble, to the Emperor; that beyond and above his master 
was another and superior power, affecting and controlling 
master and serf alike and requiring equal allegiance from 
both. This was a most difficult task. For centuries the 
power of the master over the serf had not been questioned. 
"We have only to glance over the previous history of Bus- 
sia, when the nobles claimed not only this power of abso- 
lute domination over the serfs, but also the rights of inde- 
pendent sovereignty, which they exercised to the extent of 
levying war against each other at their own will, up to as 
late an era as that of Ivan IV., who drove out the 
Tartar domination, to see in what condition of absolute 
subjugation the nobles held their serfs. These latter had 
been taught for centuries that the master was all in all, 
and on earth there was nothing superior, in fact nothing 
equal, to him. Education, of course, had been denied the 
serfs. Absolute ignorance was the condition in which he 
had been systematically and vigorously kept, the better to 
enforce the sway of the master. 
As I have said, all branches of the Government, both 



26 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

civil and military, as Nicholas found it, were in the hands 
of the serf-owners, who surrounded him as with a cordon 
of living fire. Having organized the system of bureau- 
cracy he used it with telling force against the nobles when- 
ever any manifestation of dissatisfaction, or any failure to 
render prompt obedience to law was shown. The motto 
of the Empire, which was forcibly iterated and reiterated, 
was the supremacy of the law and the absolute duty of un- 
questioning obedience thereto, without respect of classes or 
persons. Naturally enough the execution of this policy 
excited dissatisfaction in certain nobles. Dissatisfaction in 
Russia meant a renewal of the bloody chaos inaugurated 
by the Decembrists of 1825— a reign of terror and of sub- 
version of peace, order, and prosperity. Consequently any 
instance of the dissatisfaction (which was the same as overt 
acts of treason) was promptly and severely punished. 
Such punishment operated as a deterrent example to 
others, and also taught the masses that the Emperor, not 
the noble, was the supreme power in the State. 

By vigorously and inflexibly executing this policy, 
Nicholas was enabled to reach the masses, the first and es- 
sential step to the attainment of his ultimate object, the 
emancipation of the serfs and their education. 

A great deal has been said and written by ill-informed 
and romantic lecturers and magazine writers in this coun- 
try about the repression of any utterances of dissatisfaction 
at the policy of the Emperor. That such expressed dis- 
satisfaction should be punishable with the knout and with 
banishment to Siberia has been characterized as insuffera- 
ble despotism and as utterly extinguishing the rights of 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 27 

free speech and a free press. The shallowness of thought 
of these romantic critics is here amply exhibited. It 
should not be necessary to tell them, and an intelligent 
American public, that the disrespectful speaking of the 
Emperor of Eussia by a noble meant, in Rtissia, some- 
thing more than simple vulgarity or personal disrespect to 
the sovereign ruler. It meant (and means) a vast deal 
more. Behind the mere indignity of the speech there 
lurked the purpose of retarding the progress of the Em- 
pire, of thwarting the liberal and wise purposes of the Em- 
peror and his far-sighted statesmen, and of plotting 
against the peace, the prosperity, and the institutions of 
the Empire. It was treason in the same sense as levying 
war against the United States and adhering to and giving 
aid and comfort to the enemy is designated in the Ameri- 
can Constitution as treason against the United States. 

The policy of Nicholas bore good fruit. Peace was the 
general issue of that policy. Universal and unusual pros- 
perity smiled upon the Empire. Eussia developed the 
strength of a giant, and, as was shown in the Crimean 
War, was more than a match for all Europe in arms com- 
bined. And at his death he turned over a vast and gigan- 
tic Empire, thoroughly unified and consolidated, of inex- 
haustible resources and of unequaled strength, to his son 
and successor, Alexander II. And with this Empire he 
also bequeathed to that son and successor the grand and 
magnificent object, which both he and his predecessor had 
never lost sight of, the emancipation of the serfs and the 
education of the people — a grand and magnificent object 
indeed, which Alexander II. was enabled to effect. 



28 THE NEW EEA IN RUSSIA. 



CHAPTEE III. ' 

Emperor Alexander II. and the Emancipation of 
the Serfs. 

The first act of Alexander II. , after his accession to the 
throne, was to secure peace throughout the Empire by 
signing the Treaty of Paris. His next act was to bring up 
the internal administration of the government, necessarily 
affected by a state of war, to the high and efficient con- 
dition to which it had been brought by Nicholas up to the 
beginning of hostilities with Western Europe. Such was 
the admirable condition of the Empire under the unrivaled 
executive ability of Nicholas that, after correcting the 
temporary and superficial demoralization produced by the 
war, Alexander found himself able to effect the grand ob- 
ject of his predecessors, Emancipation, and to effect such 
Other changes both in the existing system of government 
and in the character of its personnel as would secure the 
blessings of a firm, wise administration of affairs in the in- 
terests of the masses, instead of one wholly devoted to the 
interests of a class. The greatest difficulty in the way of 
accomplishing this object, his own most warmly cherished 
project, as well as the dream of his predecessors, was of 
course the opposition of the nobles. The Council and 
Senate, which are the legislative bodies of the Empire, 
had, first of all, to be won over to the Emperor's support. 
In d ue course of time he laid before these bodies his plan 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 29 

of Emancipation. When it came to the knowledge of the 
great body of nobles and serf- owners that the Imperial 
Legislature was favorably considering ^his plan, a deputa- 
tion of nobles sought an audience with Alexander, and ad- 
dressed him as follows: 

"Your Imperial Majesty: We learn that the Council 
and the Senate of the Empire have before them, for delib- 
eration, with your sanction, the plan to abolish serfdom 
throughout Eussia. We are perfectly willing to abide by 
Your Majesty's decision in this matter and to loyally sup- 
port your will. But there are in Eussia a large number of 
small owners of serfs who are dependent for actual subsist- 
ence on the labor of these serfs, and who consequently will 
be left wholly penniless and without any resource, by the 
operation of emancipation. They will then undoubtedly 
resort to desperate measures, and in the extremity of their 
despair will put the life of Your Majesty in jeopardy. " 

The answer of the Great Liberator to this covert threat 
of assassination deserves to be printed letters of gold. 
With a courage no danger could quail, with a devotion to 
the cause of human freedom that nothing could shake or 
abate, the Emperor answered: 

" Gentlemen, if I should die because of my devotion to 
such a cause, I am willing to meet my fate. " 

And then, regardless of aught but the sacred rights of 
humanity, he hastened to sign the decree of emancipation, 
with one stroke of his pen giviDg freedom and citizenship 
to twenty-six millions of his fellow-countrymen. 



30 THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 

It does seem strange that in this country are to be found 
men intelligent enough to pose as lecturers on Eussia and 
Eussian institutions, who are foolhardy, misguided, and 
egotistical enough to. distort the character of this noble act 
and to misrepresent the motives of the pure and great 
man who did it. There can be but one conclusion. 
Thoroughly unacquainted with the true condition of Eus- 
sia, ignorant of the manner in which the emancipation of 
the serfs was brought about it, is unquestionably due to in- 
terested and unworthy motives that they dare assert from 
the platform in the ears of enlightened Americans that 
this great act of emancipation was forced upon Alexander 
II. by the prevailing sentiment of Europe, against his own 
wish and desire. Nothing could be falser or more ridicu- 
lously absurd than this statement. To note the sublime 
confidence in themselves of these men as they announce 
gravely and dogmatically that they are authority on Eus- 
sia and Eussian politics, is farcical in the highest degree. 
They can not, in a majority of cases, even speak the lan- 
guage of the country they are criticising. They have re- 
ceived their information at second hand — information that 
generally is a joke, intended by some facetious Eussian to 
raise a laugh at the ignoramus's credulity. They have 
never even been in Eussia, or if they have, the residence 
of most of them there has been confined to a brief and 
casual visit. Surely such men are not trustworthy or in- 
telligent guides. To insist that the intelligent people of 
America do regard them as reliable and truthful authority 
on Eussian institutions and politics, is an insult to the 
judgment and intelligence of that American people. 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 31 

No one who knew Alexander the Great — for indeed is he 
entitled to that epithet more justly than his namesake of 
Macedon — can doubt for a moment that the decree of 
emancipation was his own free act and will. No other 
historical character has ever done for humanity, for the 
sacred cause of freedom, a tithe of what the great Kussian 
Emperor has done. Let me cite the testimony of a promi- 
nent American statesman, himself a martyr to the cause 
of liberty, Hon. Cassius M. Clay, American Minister to 
Russia in the first years of Mr. Lincoln's administration. 
On his return from Eussia, Mr. Clay made an address be- 
fore the people of Washington (on the 17th of August, 
1862), in which he thus spoke of Alexander II. : 

" I think I can say without implication of profanity or 
want of reverence, that since the days of Christ himself 
such a happy and glorious privilege has not been reserved 
to any other man to do that amount of good, and no man 
has ever more gallantly or nobly done it than Alexander 
II., Czar of Eussia. I refer to the emancipation of 
twenty-six millions of serfs." 

The language of Mr. Clay will be repeated by all whose 
good fortune gave them personal knowledge of Eussia's 
great liberator, and Emperor. As a matter of fact the 
emancipation of the serfs was not forced upon him by cir- 
cumstances within the Empire, or the pressure of senti- 
ment from without. It was, to repeat what I have already 
said, the execution of the most cherished plan of the Eo- 
manoff dynasty. It was his good fortune to be on the 
throne at the opportune moment when that great state 



32 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

policy of the Imperial family could be put in practice. 
So far fortune favored him; all else was the result of his 
own wisdom and his own devotion to principle. Alexan- 
der I. had conceived the project, and made the way smooth 
for his successor to pursue the same object. That succes- 
sor, Nicholas, paved the way for the successful enforce- 
ment of the policy. But it was Alexander 11. — Alexander 
the Great — who made a glorious and tangible reality of 
this truly imperial idea. And to the latter monarch is 
justly due the credit of decreeing emancipation — is justly 
due the title of the " Great Liberator." 

The law of compensation, as Ralph Waldo Emerson 
truly observes, is omni-prevalent and immutable. No 
great good was ever achieved except at the cost of a great 
price. Freedom of the people was secured in Russia, and 
the process of education among the masses commenced, 
but a great and terrible evil sprung into active existence 
upon the very heels of this great good. For now began 
the most momentous period of the Empire's existence. 
The petty nobles as a class began to organize, secretly but 
vigorously, and plot disturbances against the authority 
and even the life of the Emperor. As they still filled 
nearly all the principal offices of the Empire, the terrible 
extent of the danger thus inaugurated may be fully esti- 
mated. 

And here it is pertinent to say a few words in explana- 
tion of one feature of the Russian Government, which will 
make intelligible to the reader the vast difficulties under 
which the last few Russian Emperors have labored in their 
efforts to secure freedom and prosperity for their people. 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 33 

In Russia, as in all other European countries to a less 
extent, the nobles form the chief administrative class and 
from their inherited prerogatives, fill, as by prescriptive 
right, the principal offices of the Government, both civil 
and military. They constantly surround the Emperor in 
their official character, and he therefore would be practi- 
cally at their mercy were there no counteracting influences 
to offset them. Through the great practical foresight of 
Nicholas, a strong bureaucracy had been formed, taken 
from other classes than the nobles, and in close relations 
with the masses of the people. Through their aid and 
strength the disaffected nobility have been to a great ex- 
tent overawed and thereby prevented from engaging in an 
open revolt. It was, moreover, through the power this 
bureaucracy enabled him to exercise over the nobility that 
the Emperor was able to decree the abolition of serfdom 
without producing an instant and universal insurrection of 
such disaffected nobles. The bureaucracy is the medium 
through which the Emperor comes into contact with the 
masses. Through its agency he is enabled to command 
the direct support of the people. Indirectly, therefore, 
the bureaucracy was the immediate instrumentality where- 
with Alexander II. had the power to decree and enforce 
the decree of Emancipation. This fact of itself shows that 
the Imperial Government of Eussia is a popular and not 
an aristocratic one — that the Emperor is the ruler not 
merely of the classes but the popular, nay, the adored, 
sovereign of the masses. Hence, it will be seen how 
ridiculously absurd are the rhodomontades and silly senti- 
mentalities of those ignorant lectures and magazine- writers 



34 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

who boldly grapple with and attempt to explain matters of 
which they know no more than they do of the other side 
of the moon! 

The support of the masses and the power given the Em- 
peror through the bureaucracy were sufficient to prevent 
the nobility from plunging into open insurrection but did 
not prevent this disaffected and reactionary class from en- 
gaging earnestly, though secretly, in the work of sedition. 
Upon the petty nobles of Eussia the emancipation of the 
serfs fell like a thunder-bolt from a clear sky. This 
branch of the aristocracy, whose passions had been always 
more sedulously cultivated than their reason or prudence, 
seemed to " lose their heads," though they preserved 
enough of common sense to refrain from raising the ban- 
ner of open insurrection. Nevertheless they hesitated not 
to freely utter threats against the life of Alexander. They 
declaimed bitterly about what they called the destruction 
of their inherited rights, and swore they would be revenged 
for such deprivation of prescriptive prerogatives. Nor did 
they confine themselves and their threats to Alexander 
alone, but swore and plotted vengeance upon the whole 
Imperial family. Indolent and debauched idlers as most 
of them were, having, by emancipation of their serfs, lost 
the source of their power to indulge, as before, in idleness 
and debauchery, they execrated with all the vehemence of 
their fiery natures the Emperor who had removed from 
them the power to continue the gratification of their de- 
bauched and licentious tastes. For it must be acknowl- 
edged that a great part of the Eussian nobility at that ' 
period, and more especially most of the petty nobles, were 



• 

THE NEW EEA IN EUSSIA. 3o 



a cruel, brutal, licentious, grossly sensual set They had 
become depraved and unjust to a degree previously un- 
known, preserving no virtue, one may truthfully say, but 
courage, and they required heroic remedies applied to their 
case to restore them to a condition of moral health. In- 
capable, however, of recognizing this latter truth, and un- 
willing to accept it even if they could have perceived its 
force and beneficence, they sullenly but actively persevered 
in their course of covert treason. The Government mean- 
while, fully alive to the danger, and even more active than 
the traitors, took every precaution against their plots, and 
visited with great but just severity all those detected in 
treasonable schemes. The life of the nation, the freedom 
and prosperity of the people were at stake, and it was no 
time for child's play. Meanwhile the great work of com- 
pleting the project of emancipation was carried on as vig- 
orously as if there had been no opposition whatever. To 
each of the emancipated serfs Alexander made an allot- 
ment of land and extended to them State aid to start him 
in the character of landowner. This project of building 
up a landed peasantry, an independent class of yeomanry, 
marks how broad and deep was the statesmanship of the 
Great Liberator. 

Grand, however, as was this stroke of the wisest, most 
far-sighted statesmanship, it was the ** last straw which 
broke the camel's back." It stirred into irreconcilable, 
unreasoning, fanatical hatred the passions of the malig- 
nant reactionists. The reactionary spirit that had first 
manifested its turbulence and lawlessness with the Decem- 
ber revolt of 1825, and which then had been so thoroughly 



36 THE NEW ERA iW RUSSIA. 

stamped out, had not then been entirely destroyed, and at 
this last evidence of Alexander's solicitude for the people 
it flamed again into bright and fiery strength. From the 
discontented, turbulent, and narrow-minded petty nobles, 
exasperated by being suddenly arrested in their career of 
idleness and debauchery, and still further inflamed by see- 
ing their former slaves elevated to the dignity of landown- 
ers, from such a source mainly, I repeat, there sprung into 
existence the foulest spawn of insurrection and reaction 
that Eussia had ever known, worse because viler and more 
sordid than the Decembrist insurrection — the germ of the 
Nihilism that assassinated the Great Liberator. 

Of course there are always to be found in every country 
dreamers and visionaries who spend their lives in con- 
structing new theories, sometimes beautiful, sometimes 
grotesque, but always impracticable, of life, of govern- 
ment, of morality. When a people, especially a quick- 
witted, imaginative, excitable people like the Eussian, is 
suddenly raised from slavery to freedom there will be 
found many who, for the time, become intoxicated with 
the deep draughts which for the first time they are per- 
mitted to quaff. So there were here and there, especially 
among the younger students of the universities, an indi- 
vidual found of the class whom Americans call " cranks " 
—men incapable, through want of sufficient strength of 
reasoning power, of distinguishing false from true theories 
of life and liberty. These mental and moral abortions of 
the great national travail which resulted in the birth of 
freedom and respect for law among the masses of the peo- 
ple, were appropriated by the wiser but far more censura- 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 37 

ble nobles, and their mistaken enthusiasms converted into 
instruments of murder, sedition, and other crimes. 

Having enlisted on their side, under false pretenses, 
these deluded and sentimental students, who had been 
seduced by the false and deluding cry of " freedom and 
constitution for the people;" having engaged with them 
the poisonous scum that floats upon the tide of life of all 
the great cities of the world, and finding certain minds 
susceptible to such teachings, the nobles, while continuing 
their secret plots, now taught as rudiments of the " free- 
dom and constitution " they proposed to give the people, 
certain doctrines unknown anywhere except to the class of 
human outlaws now designated as " Anarchists " or 
" Mafia. " Ignoring the fact that Russia had a constitu- 
tion, that slavery had been abolished, that the people had 
been given freedom, and that the whole power of the Gov- 
ernment was zealously employed in putting down disorder, 
crime, lawlessness, despotism, and sedition, the discontent- 
ed nobles, the better to attain their purpose and secure 
their revenge, taught their followers that assassination and 
arson must precede liberty and justice, and that it was 
both patriotic and profitable to begin the new order of 
things by first utterly destroying the old. 

Thus was Nihilism hurled against the sovereign and the 
people of Russia by reactionary spirits, who regarded no 
law but their own passions and held nothing sacred that 
contravened their will or checked their desires. 

So the foul work went on. Plot after plot was hatched 
to kill the Emperor, attempt after attempt upon his life 
was made, and finally, in the early part of 1881, the foul 



38 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

deed was committed, and the noblest and greatest of 
modern sovereigns fell a victim to his love for freedom and 
his devotion to his people. 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 39 



CHAPTER IV. 

The Reign of Emperor Alexander III., and the 
grandeur oe the russian empire under his 
wise National Policy. 

His son, Alexander III., was the successor of the great 
and good Liberator, Alexander II., who, as I have shown, 
accomplished at one stroke for the Russian people what it 
took the Anglo-saxon race centuries to effect — the eleva- 
tion of the masses to freedom and the establishment of poli- 
tical rights among the lately enslaved. 

Speaking from personal knowledge, from careful study 
and observation, and after comparison of existing Govern- 
ments, not merely of civilized Europe, but of semi-barba- 
rous Africa and Asia, I again unequivocally and unqualified- 
ly assert, as I already have proved, that there are but two 
Governments in the world that are for the masses, and not 
primarily for the " classes " — the Governments of Russia 
and the United States. I wish, in saying this, to be clear- 
ly understood as acknowledging the radical difference in 
the methods of administration, in the forms of applying 
and executing the principles underlying each system, but 
as regards the object sought to be attained they are iden- 
tical. This declaration may sound strange to most ears, 
but an examination of the operation of either Government 
will clearly demonstrate the truth of what I say. 

It is pertinent to my subject to here remark that Alex- 



40 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

ander 111., of Eussia, prior to ascending the throne, was, 
as the masses of the people were fully aware, deeply imbued 
with liberal ideas. He was very advanced in those ideas. 
He accepted the logical sequence of these advanced politi- 
cal ideas precisely as they are accepted by the most pro- 
gressive school of political economists in Western Europe 
and the United States to-day. But Alexander is not 
merely a doctrinnaire. He is, as has been all his family, 
eminently a practical man. After his ascension to the 
throne it took him but a little while to find that certain 
reforms inaugurated by his father, the Great Liberator — 
where they were made on the line of Western European 
thought, and consequently diverged from the Russian na- 
tional and natural idea — were practically failures. He 
grasped the great truth that Russia by pursuing a policy 
on such lines of development would be only an imitator 
and would meet the inevitable fate of imitators — ruin. 
The only true policy for Russia, Alexander saw, was the 
national and racial one. She must work out her own des- 
tiny after a Russian fashion and not pattern after a Teu- 
tonic or a Latin model. After fully surveying the field 
and adopting what he considered to be the true policy, 
Alexander III. proceeded, in a similar manner to that 
adopted by Nicholas, to purify the Empire from the taint 
of foreign ideas that had crept into the country through 
the efforts of a seditious class of citizens actuated by no 
genuine love of their country. The vile effects of these 
ideas were already disastrously seen in various parts of the 
Empire. Alexander insists that it is essential for the 
true development of Russia's resources, and for the evolu- 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 41 

tion of the highest and best form of civilization that she can 
attain, that a country having eight millions of square miles 
and one hundred and twelve millions of people should de- 
velop originality in her growth and not pattern after any 
other. No matter how admirable may be other forms of civil- 
ization, or how valuable other methods of thought, their 
chief value lies in their adaptability to the wants and needs of 
the people who apply them. If they are not spontane- 
ous, if they do not spring from the national mind and 
flourish in the national heart, then they are exotic and not 
adapted to the necessities of the people. Foreign habits 
and foreign ideas as a rule are distasteful to people on 
whom they are forced, as they are clearly unsuitable. 

Alexander has, during the few years of his reign, made 
Eussia for Russians. This great and truly national 
idea has become the cardinal doctrine of the Russian poli- 
tical faith, and the national party to-day in Russia is the 
Imperial Party. The doctrines of that party are that a 
progressive and liberal government, having for its sole 
object the welfare of the people, is the government for 
Russia. But these ideas are strictly within the plane of 
Russian national and racial development. 

In speaking of the masterly manner in which Alexander 
III. of Russia has made so triumphant a success of his 
policy, I am compelled necessarily to be brief. Not one 
but many volumes would be necessary to describe, even 
generally, the wonderful victory he has won over the hos- 
tile elements he had to contend with. The difficulties that 
beset him were appallingly great. He had literally to sur- 
mount the insurmountable-* JI e had to stamp out that 



42 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

product of imported foreign ideas, and native reactionary 
spirit, Nihilism. He was eminently successful in this 
work. Nihilism to-day does not exist in Russia, except 
in rare and isolated examples. It still flourishes, but its 
headquarters to-day are in England and the United States. 
Even in Switzerland it has been crushed out. The diffi- 
culties attending this most necessary task were herculean 
indeed, but that they were overcome shows how warmly 
and earnestly the people seconded the efforts of the Em- 
peror. As a consequence, the Nihilists are hardly to be 
found in Eussia. On the authority of Mr. George Kennan, 
who has given this subject careful study, 1 can say, in his 
own words, " that there are only 2,837 Nihilists in Russia 
known to the police." Those are scattered over an ex- 
panse of eight million square miles of territory, and are 
buried up in one hundred and twelve millions of people, 
go thoroughly indeed has the good work been done in 
Russia, and so thoroughly opposed to this murderous insti- 
tution known as Nihilism is the Russian people, that the 
example of Russia has been imitated in other countries. 
The Nihilistic societies no longer exist in Russia; they 
have been driven out of Switzerland, Germany, Austria, 
and even out of France. They are to be found only in 
England and the United States! 

To briefly summarize: Russia to-day, under the wise 
rule of Alexander III., is not only united but unified. 
Stretching over eight millions of square miles, to repeat, 
and numbering one hundred and twelve millions of people, 
she has more that doubled the territorial area of Imperial 
Rome in the plentitude of the latter's power. With incal- 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 43 

culable resources, with an unbounded enthusiasm on the 
part of her people in the future destiny of their country, 
Eussia stands to-day in the ranks of civilized nations 
absolutely primus inter pares, and confessedly dictates the 
policy of Europe. Nay, more; 1 am not transgressing 
the strictest lines of the truth when I say she controls the 
destiny of Europe. Her destiny as a nation is clearly 
marked out. In the course of a short space of time she 
will dominate the entire Eastern Continent, either by ab- 
sorption or by conquest, and, in fact, be the Old World. 
And the United Stages of America, whose destiny is the 
same, will in a few years dominate, yea, absorb, the entire 
Western Continent from Greenland to Cape Horn, and 
make the New World as homogeneous as Russia will have 
made the Old. Under different forms of government the 
object of both governments is and will be the same: the 
elevation of the masses and the development of humanity 
along the lines of the highest civilization. True friends 
and rivals only in this work of elevating humanity to its 
highest possible condition in this life, the two great powers, 
Russia the Oriental, and America the Occidental, will fill 
the earth with their greatness, and literally dictate the 
terms of existence to humanity. Be assured that those 
terms will be the highest evolution of human wisdom on 
the line of a broad and ever enlarging Christianity. 



44 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 



CHAPTER V. 

The Origin of Nihilism. 

It is erroneously stated by professional lecturers and 
sensational magazine-writers in this country that Nihil- 
ism first took its birth in an attempt of its partisans to 
give freedom and constitutional government to Russia — a 
statement not only erroneous, but absurd. One of these 
lecturers, Mr. W. J. Armstrong, in an address delivered 
in Washington City, at the invitation of a large number of 
prominent statesmen, asserted that the term " Nihilism " 
was first used by the Russian novelist, Ivan Tourgenieff, 
in his work entitled " Fathers and Sons," and applied to 
describe a class of Anarchists who wished to reduce civiliz- 
ation to nil, to chaos. This lecturer showed himself en- 
tirely ignorant of the origin of the term. The word first 
originated in the Venetian Republic, from a society of 
hired thugs and assassins, known as " bravos," who pro- 
duced such consternation in Venice by their bold and mur- 
derous deeds. When one of these cut-throats was appre- 
hended his invariable reply to questions as to his motives 
and associates was, " Nihil " — I know nothing. This so- 
ciety had its ramifications in Sicily and the Calabrian 
mountains, and finally culminated in the secret organiza- 
tion now know as the " Mafia," which has begun of late 
years to spread such dismay and enact such murderous 
deeds in the United States. Against it the entire moral 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 45 

and physical power of the nation is ready to be hurled. 
The term " Nihil," with all the diabolical character that 
it implied, was imported into Kussia after the Emancipa- 
tion, by the petty nobles, and its elements incorporated in 
a secret society, modelled in organization after the fashion 
of the legendary Vehm Gericht of Germany of the Middle 
Ages. Each member was unknown to any other, except 
the directing council; its oaths were similar to the tradi- 
tional oaths of the Vehm Gericht; the Council was the 
sole source whence emanated the orders for assassination 
or pillage, and it also was the sole judge of the qualifica- 
tions of recruits. The initiation ceremonies had a certain 
awe-inspiring solemnity which, combined with the false 
pretenses involved in its ritual as to its motives, was well 
calculated to arouse the enthusiasm of the deluded and 
sentimental students who were seduced into joining it. So 
a similar enthusiasm was created among the deluded 
Assassins or followers of the Ishmaelite Hassan, from 
whom has originated the modern term "Assassination." 
As is well known, each member of this society of " Nihil- 
ists," when engaged in carrying out the orders of the 
Council, had about his person both the instrument of 
assassination and a vial of deadly poison. He had strict 
orders (which he never hesitated to obey as far as possible) 
that if he should be caught in the act of committing the 
deed he was deputed to do, to use the poison on himself. 
Of course the object of these orders was to prevent any ex- 
pose" of the criminal's co-operator in crime (for they hunt- 
ed in pairs) or any revelation concerning the society, which 
might be made after reflection and punishment had less- 



46 THE NEW EEA IN RUSSIA. 

ened the murderer's enthusiasm. But when caught and 
prevented from using the poison on himself he must, un- 
der penalty of death at the hands of the society, answer to 
every question put to him with ** Nihil " — I know 
nothing. And really he did know nothing beyond his in- 
structions and his oaths. His instructions, which he obeyed 
implicitly, were to be at a certain place at a certain time 
and to kill a certain person. 

The above account is a true explanation of the origin of 
the term " Nihil " as applied to conspirators against Rus- 
sian freedom and law. .It is also a true and faithful state- 
ment of the character and purposes of the order as it 
existed in Eussia and now in England and the United 
States. 

Having thus shown the origin and the character of Ni- 
hilism in Russia I will now proceed to make plain that the 
main object of its originators, the petty serf-owners, was 
the assassination not only of the Emperor himself but of 
the whole Imperial family. True to their threats, they 
went to work organizing plots to effect their purpose and 
to glut their revenge. Besides the classes of recruits 
already mentioned, there were others, men and women, 
who were enlisted in the ranks of Nihilism and proved 
valuable allies because they had nothing to lose and were 
deluded with the promises of the Council, who assured 
them of position and wealth if they were successful in car- 
rying out the work assigned to them, and guaranteed to 
them protection if they were apprehended. It mattered 
not that when a would-be Nihilistic assassin was caught 
he invariably failed to receive any protection from the 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 47 

" Council ;" the deluded and murderous enthusiasts be- 
lieved and trusted as implicitly as ever. 

When this main object was accomplished and the Great 
Liberator, Alexander II., was assassinated, the better class 
of the Russian members quitted the order which hence- 
forth existed, and exists only as an organization of hired 
assassins. For there were men in it who saw what a profit- 
able instrument for pillage it could become under skillful 
management. Existing in Bussia scarcely except in name, it 
has been transferred to England and the United States, and, 
having lost every vestige of the character of the Vehm 
Gericht, it has become a repetition of the Sicilian Mafia. 
Its members can be hired for assassination, as could the 
ancient " bravos " of Venice. For example, the Eussian 
General Seliverstoff who was lately killed in Paris, by the 
Polish Nihilist, Padlewski, at the instigation and for a stip- 
ulated price of some personal enemy of the general. 

Nihilism and Anarchism are now the same, are identical, 
as is admitted everywhere. Herr Most, the famous An- 
archist of New York, who is certainly an authority on the 
subject, so testified, in the most emphatic language, 
under oath before the Ford Congressional Committee dur- 
ing the investigation into the alleged importation of foreign 
contract labor. It is my own judgment that, if there is 
any difference in the extent of their diabolical designs, the 
Anarchists are entitled to the credit of holding less ad- 
vanced opinions. 



48 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 



CHAPTER VI. 

The Administrative Process and "Politicals." 

The " Administrative Process," as it is termed in Rus- 
sia, or as the same system is better known in this country 
as proceedings under a suspension of the writ of habeas 
corpus, is recognized as legitimate by all international 
law of comity, and the mode of proceeding against such 
delinquents as come within the purview of this " Adminis- 
trative Process " is also a recognized feature of such com- 
ity. When, for example, a disturbance in Russia arises of 
such magnitude that the local police can not suppress it, the 
Central Government steps in, enforces the " Administrative 
Process/' that is to say, suspends the writ of habeas cor- 
pus, and puts down the trouble, whether it be a treasona- 
ble uprising or an organized effort at riot and pillage. 
Similar events have occurred in this country, and the 
great writ of habeas corpus has been suspended for a time 
sufficient to quell the disturbance. The trial of offenders 
under this ' ' process " is conducted in Russia as it is in 
the United. States. Provost-marshals and courts-martial 
have frequently stepped in in the United States, swept 
away the machinery of the courts, and sent women and 
men to the gallows or to the file of musketry. There 
never was a country where men were more frequently ar- 
rested without the intervention of the ordinary machinery 
of law and incarcerated in military prisons or forts, denied 



THE NEW ERA IN" EUSSIA. 49 

the presence of their friends or counsels, arrested without 
warrant by provost-marshals, taken from the bosom of 
their families at the dead of night, and hurried away to im- 
prisonment for a longer or shorter time, than in these 
United States, on both sides, during the late Civil War. 
The career of Baker's detectives in the Federal Capital at 
once supersedes the necessity for saying more. Where is 
the Imperial officer in Russia who ever acted with more 
tyrannical and despotic disregard of the general process of 
law than did many of those detectives and provost-mar- 
shals in the United States, both Union and Confederate, 
in those long, dark days from 1861 to 1865? And when 
John H. Surratt fled from America to Eome, with the ter- 
rors of a court-martial hanging over his head, and the 
United States Government learned of his whereabouts, it 
sent an armed ship to the Papal Capital demanding and 
receiving his extradition. The government at Eome did 
not inquire whether Surratt was accused by a court-mar- 
tial or indicted by a grand jury, whether he was to be tried 
by a provost-marshal or by a judge and due process of law. 
He was surrendered, and surrendered because of this inter- 
national comity which recognizes the right of each nation 
to deal in its own way with its own criminals. 

The assassination of the lamented Alexander II., effect- 
ed by discontented slave-owners, infuriated at the emanci- 
pation of these serfs, and the introduction into Russia, at 
their instigation, of a foreign and murderous element now 
known generally in this country as Anarchists, for awhile 
kept Russia, after the assassination of the Great Liberator, 
in a state of turmoil. Local revolts, instigated by this dis- 



50 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

contented class of nobles, sprung up here and there, of too 
much magnitude for the local police to cope with; assassi- 
nations by the murderous foreign element, and the vision- 
ary and vicious native cranks who started to the front in 
this stirring period, were frequent, and for awhile it 
seemed as if the reign of law and order would be seriously 
impeded. It was at this juncture that the Central Govern- 
ment stepped in, and with the strong hand of the " Ad- 
ministrative Process " put down and checked disorder, re- 
stored the reign of law, with the consequent prosperity of 
the people and development of the Empire. But while 
this " Administrative Process " in Russia is freely used, it 
is used with rare wisdom and discretion, and its decrees 
enforced with a humanity strangely at contrast with the 
frequently severe suspension of the writ of habeas corpus 
in this country and England. For example: When a no- 
torious and depraved criminal, guilty of murder and of other 
crimes, leagued with wretches as vile as himself, comes 
within the province of the administrative process, his guilt 
is not assumed, but the evidence is carefully sifted, he is 
given the benefit of every doubt, and when convicted he is 
sent not to a dungeon cell for life, nor to the gallows, but 
is deported to Siberia and given a chance in that country 
to begin life anew. Generally speaking, when such a hard- 
ened criminal, after some years' residence in Siberia, falls 
in with a certain class of magazine writers, he calls himself 
a " political prisoner/' a Nihilist, and the magazine writer 
immediately heralds it to the American world that here is 
another suffering patriot torn, at the dead of night, from 
the bosom of his family by the tyrannical arm of the ad- 



THE NEW EKA IN RUSSIA. 51 

rninistrative process and hurried off by forced marches to 
Siberia. 

I leave the execution of Eussian justice by administra- 
tive process to what I doubt not will be considered a fair 
comparison with the execution of justice by the suspen- 
sion of the writ of habeas corpus in this country and Eng- 
land. 

A great deal has been said of late by a magazine writer 
of the indiscriminate use of the prerogative vested in the 
Eussian authorities, namely, arrest and punishment by 
" Administrative Process." This writer cites various cases 
to support his assertions. But it should be observed that 
his authority on this subject is altogether that of the 
" Exiles. " In order to verify their statements to him he 
interviewed a great many of this class, and as their state- 
ments tallied in every case he concluded that they were 
true, and straightway introduces them to the world as in- 
controvertible facts. This eager philanthropist, burning 
with an ardent desire to show to the world his new and 
wonderful discoveries — discoveries no one else ever thought 
of making, though with equal or greater facilities — for- 
gets either wilfully, or, what is more likely, thoughtlessly, 
his own previous statements that during twenty years of 
the reign of Alexander II. only 443 State prisoners or 
" politicals " had been deported to Siberia out of a popula- 
tion of one hundred and twelve millions, and that in each 
and every case they had been treated with the greatest con- 
sideration.* But he also shows himself thoroughly igno- 
rant of the Exile system of criminals to Siberia, which, as 
* See Kennan's letter, page 67. 



52 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

he truly says, averages from 15,000 to 20,000 annually, 
whose abodes in this country and elsewhere than Russia 
would be penitentiaries and dungeon cells. He also shows 
himself ignorant of the fact that the character of their 
crimes is unknown even to those officials having charge of 
them, but all of them, as " Exiles " only, are described by 
their names, and the character of the punishment whether 
as " settlers/' which does not carry hard labor with it, or 
as condemned to hard labor. The crime for which each 
one is deported is known only to the court which sentenced 
him and to the central prison administration, which has a 
transcript of the sentence from the records of the court. 
When the " Exiles " (as I again repeat all prisoners are 
termed) are convicted for crimes that entitle them to be 
sent as " settlers " (that is to say, without hard labor), 
they, if of the educated classes or of the nobility not used to 
manual labor, are given an allowance by the government 
and perfect freedom of action. Other criminals who are 
sentenced to hard labor would for the same crime in this 
country receive a sentence of 20 years, more or less, but in 
Siberia have not more than 1 to 5 years of hard labor, and 
for the remainder of this sentence, no matter how long, 
if their behavior has been good, sent as " settlers " to 
other parts of Siberia and given freedom of action just as 
the prisoner whose original sentence was that of a " settler. " 
When these prisoners come to a settlement or a colony 
they naturally fraternize and form a society to themselves. 
Neither knows the crime of the other, or even the police in 
charge of him, but invariably they form a club where they 
meet, drink tea, gossip, &c. Of course these prisoners will 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 53 

tell each other that he or she was sent to Siberia for being 
a " political " by " administrative process/' never as a 
murderer or burglar or for any other flagitious, vulgar 
offense. Many of them are highly educated — as we have 
highly educated criminals in this country or in England. 
When the magazine writer I have alluded to above happen- 
ed to be in their neighborhood and interviewed them he was 
naturally told the same story they tell each other, namely, 
that they have been sent to Siberia by administrative proc- 
ess as " politicals " and never as murderers, burglars, or 
other vicious criminals. 

One word about the "young girls torn from their 
homes " and sent, to Siberia as political prisoners. It is 
hardly necessary to say what is so well known, but I will 
here state that every prisoner, no matter what crime he 
committed — murderer, burglar, &c, sent to Siberia has 
the privilege of being accompanied by his relations, if they 
choose to go. For example : If the prisoner is a married 
man, his wife and children are allowed to go with him and 
so form a family in the place of banishment. If she is a 
woman, she is, if married, permitted to have her family^ 
husband and children to accompany her; or if single, her 
mother or sisters. These female relatives, especially the 
children of the prisoners, are the ones who are introduced 
to itinerant magazinists, and by them described to the world 
as the young girls of fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen years 
of age who are " torn from their homes by administrative 
process " and sent to Siberia as " politicals!" What ab- 
surdity! 

But these female children " pose " also as " politicals/' 



54 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

and much sympathy has been expended in this country 
over their imaginary woes. 

Let it not be forgotten that, whatever any magazine or 
newspaper writer may say to the contrary, the " Adminis- 
trative Process " is used very seldom in Eussia, and never 
except in the most aggravated cases or where the most 
hardened and dangerous criminals are concerned. 



THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 55 



CHAPTER VIL 

Siberia. 

The Siberia of to-day is not the legendary Siberia of the 
past. It is well here to say that it is the custom in Russia 
for nurses and school-teachers to impress on the minds of 
the younger generation of children, at their most impress- 
ible age, that if they are " bad children " they will be 
sent to Siberia. Just in the same manner the German 
mothers and fathers are wont at Christmas times to awe 
their children with the legend of Beltsnickel and his whips 
for bad boys and girls. Siberia is pictured to the minds 
of the Russian children as a dreary region in which these 
who are sent there are chained to wheelbarrows which they 
forever pull along, or linked to rocks in a never-ending 
servitude, or condemned to perpetual labor in the miues. 
The horrors of this imaginary region are further pictured 
in gloomy colors by representations of life — hundreds of 
feet under ground, where the sunlight never greets the 
eyes of the unfortunate victim of punishment. At the 
least infraction of a severe discipline the children are as- 
sured that the knout awaits them, or a terrible abode in 
under-ground galleries where the water will drip perpetu- 
ally from the rocks upon their tattered clothing, and that 
they will be starved and further maltreated. These stories 
of Siberia are told to the young in Russia as an efficacious 
means of repressing too ardent youthful spirits, of check- 



56 THE NEW EEA IN KTJSSIA. 

ing boyish tendencies to mischief, or to save nurses and 
pedagogues any more labor than is actually necessary to 
control their young charges. Such childish convictions 
are found to be very potent, and the impression made is so 
vivid that it is never forgotten, even when age and judg- 
ment have given a correct idea of the facts. 

As is well known, Russia is not so numerously or widely 
visited by people from other countries as is Western Eu- 
rope, but being of such vast extent and gigantic power and 
controlling the destinies of Europe as she does, there is a 
great demand on the part of educated people elsewhere for 
information as to an Empire that stands out to them as so 
great a marvel of power and grandeur. A case in point is 
presented by the intense curiosity with which Americans, 
prior to the opening of Japan and Corea to the world, en- 
tertained for that "marvelous kingdom of Cipango." 
So intense was that curiosity, so fascinating the subject, 
that the American people for a time listened eagerly to 
the most wonderful, ay, the most grotesque stories about 
the far-off Orient, and accepted them unhesitatingly as 
truth. For the same reason Eussia is to-day a much- 
worked field for sensational magazine writers and public 
lecturers who, knowing how strongly romantic and won- 
derful stories appeal to the principle of human curiosity, 
are distorting facts, drawing largely on their imagination 
for descriptions of Russian laws, character, and internal ad- 
ministration. As the Russian language is not generally 
understood outside of that vast Empire, these sensational 
writers launch boldly upon that sea of mystery and bring 
back incredible stories of the knout and of the absolute 



THE 'NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 57 

power of the Emperor, who so thoroughly terrorizes a 
whole nation that they are in the most abject and cower- 
ing submission at his feet. I say " incredible " stories, 
for they are, these highly wrought but absolutely false nar- 
rations of the despotism of the Emperor; how he sends to 
the knout, to the ax, or to Siberia, at the caprice of his 
own tyrannical will, all classes and conditions of people, 
from the aged grandsire to the infaut torn from its moth- 
er's arms; and how one hundred and twelve millions of 
civilized and warlike people, covering an area of eight 
millions of square miles, have neither the power nor the 
spirit to resist or protest. 

As an example of the avidity with which foreigners 
greedily devour the most astonishing stories about Russia 
and how the manufacture of stories from pure imagination 
has got to be a recognized industry in certain quarters, 1 
will relate an incident that came under my observation in 
1860 in St. Petersburg. A correspondent of the London 
Telegraph was sent by that paper to Russia to " write it 
up," as American newspaper men would say. He was 
unacquainted with the language and therefore applied, to 
his friends for an interpreter. Some time afterward, while 
dining with several prominent officials of the government, 
the correspondent astonished but amused the latter by 
gravely relating as actual and common facts of every-day 
life in Russia the most astounding and Munchausen -like 
stories that could be invented. He said, in good faith, 
that he had got them from his interpreter, who translated 
for him from the lips of the people these wonderful stories. 
The interpreter was sent for and questioned by the corre- 



58 THE NEW EEA IN KTJSSIA. 

spondent's friends as to his motives for so grossly imposing 
on a foreigner. He boldly confessed and sought to justify 
his action. " These foreigners," he said, " are so greedy 
of hearing just such yarns as these about Eussian despot- 
ism and cruelty that you must give them such a diet in 
large quantities. If I had simply told the man the truth 
he would have discharged me, got somebody else to feed 
him and his paper with imaginary horrors, and 1 would 
have lost my pay and expenses as interpreter!" 

Lord Brougham, in reviewing for Blackwood's Magazine 
a book on Eussia, written by the celebrated traveler and 
discoverer, Adolph Erman, says: 

" Much has been written concerning European Eussia 
and its inhabitants, and it was hardly to be expected that 
even so acute an observer as Mr. Erman should find any- 
thing particularly novel to say about them. He takes a 
sensible and practical view of the condition, character, 
and disposition of the population, and is happy in his de- 
tection and indication of natioual peculiarities. He does 
not, like the majority of travelers in Eussia, enter the 
country with a settled determination to behold nothing 
from the White Sea to the Black but oppression and 
cruelty on the one hand, slavery and suffering on the 
other. He does not come to a premature decision that, 
because Eussia is ruled by an absolute monarch, all hap- 
piness, prosperity, and justice are essentially banished 
from the land. It is really pleasant to find a deviation 
from the established routine of books about Eussia. 
These are now nearly all concocted upon one and the same 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 59 

plan. The recipe is as exact as any in Mrs. Eundell, and 
is as conscientiously adhered to by literary cooks as the 
great artist's invaluable precepts are by knights and ladies 
of the ladle. 

' ' Tyranny, misery, and the knout are the chief ingredi- 
ents of the savory dish. "We are shown a nation's cretins 
crushed under the boot-heel of an imperial ogre; while a 
selfish, servile aristocracy salaam their admiration, and 
catch greedily at the titles and gewgaws thrown to them 
as a sop by their terrible master. This is the substance of 
the mess, which, being handsomely garnished with lying 
anecdotes of horrible cruelties practiced upon the unfort- 
unate population, is deemed sufficiently dainty to set be- 
fore the public, and is forthwith devoured as genuine and 
nutritive food by the large body of simpletons who take 
type for a guarantee of veracity. Mr. Erman despises the 
common trick and clap-trap resorted to by vulgar writers. 
Avoiding anecdotage and abuse of the powers that be, he 
gives, in brief, shrewd paragraphs, glimpses of Muscovite 
character and feelings which clearly prove the people of 
that vast empire to be far happier, more prosperous, and 
more practically free than the inhabitants of many coun- 
tries who boast of liberty/' 

Such testimony from such a source can not fail to carry 
weight with all thoughtful and just persons sufficient to 
overthrow the imaginary horrors of Eussian despotism 
given to the public by magazine and newspaper writers. 

Of course English and American correspondents, unac- 
quainted with the language, and ignorant of the customs 



60 THE NEW EEA IN EUSSIA. 

and institutions of the people, but regarding Kussia with a 
sort of morbid curiosity — such correspondents, 1 say, when 
they visit that Empire invariably and of necessity employ 
interpreters. These interpreters are generally taken, for 
the reason they can speak English, from younger students 
of the universities, who, being full to overflowing of ani- 
mal spirits, seize every opportunity to "play tricks upon 
travelers/' to " chaff " the simple-minded seekers after 
information. They do this with less hesitation since they 
find such "guying" is more acceptable than the cold, 
solid truth. So these students find it pleasant and profita- 
ble to relate to their employers, as absolute facts, those 
legends of Siberian horrors, those Beltsnickel myths of 
Siberian dangers which they themselves were regaled with 
when they were young children from the lips of nurses and 
village pedagogues. The wilder and more atrocious the 
story the more eagerly is it received. For many of their 
employers, these correspondents are perfectly aware of 
the commercial value of " news," in the American sense 
of that term, and when they can get hold of something 
that can affect the " stock market " they are too com- 
mercially sharp not to give it due circulation in quarters 
that seldom inquire what the truth really is. And these 
men are too often lauded as exponents of the truth when 
they are simply co-efficients of fairy tales. 

Now, not only every American, but the citizen of every 
other civilized country in the world knows that any un- 
necessary severity, any wanton cruelty perpetrated upon 
criminals by the officers of the law, even in the extremest 
cases for expediency's sake, is held as barbarous in the 



THE NEW EEA IN RUSSIA. Gl 

nineteenth century, and is not to be tolerated under any 
circumstances in so enlightened an age. I venture to state 
from personal observation and a careful study of the sub- 
ject that there are no other countries in the world where 
the criminal law is so well adapted to the character of the 
people, and its execution so humane, as in Russia and the 
United States. Of course, the execution of the law in 
both countries is left to subordinate officials, and if cruel- 
ties to convicted criminals (or to persons accused of crime) 
are committed in either Eussia or the United States, they 
are not the fault of the law, but arise solely from the im- 
perfections of humanity. For the law in both these coun- 
tries neither sanctions nor tolerates cruelty, and the official 
guilty of it in either country is speedily and condignly pun- 
ished. But on the other hand the question arises, What 
shall be done with refractory and incorrigible criminals, in 
either Eussia or the United States, who will not submit to 
necessary discipline? Of course their treatment is and 
must be left to the discretion of the officials charged with 
the execution of the law's sentence and the supervision of 
the law's infractors. And in either country if these 
officials overstep a wise and merciful discretion, they 
themselves are punished. 

The celebrated English philanthropist, John Howard, 
after visiting Eussia and inspecting her system of deporta- 
tion of criminals to Siberia, pronounced warmly in its 
favor, declaring it to be at once merciful and efficacious. 
He earnestly recommended the adoption by England of a 
similar system, and his recommendation was afterward in 
part acted upon by the establishment of Botany Bay as an 



62 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. ' 

English penal colony. Mr. Howard maintained that by 
giving a criminal his freedom and permitting his family to 
accompany him, but segregating him from his evil associa- 
tions and aiding him to become a useful citizen, the crimi- 
nal became invariably reformed, unless he was incorrigible 
and depraved beyond redemption, cases that, happily for 
the character of humanity, are rare. Such a system in- 
deed, I boldly assert, is a truly Christian one, as involving 
the policy not of retribution but of reformation. 

So Siberia in reality is not the Siberia of old women's 
fables and pedagogic legends told to frighten young chil- 
dren. Nor are its penal stations the terrible institutions 
described in these fables and reiterated by sensational 
magazine writers. I have quoted one great authority, 
John Howard, who declares that the Siberian system of 
banishment of criminals is the most Christian-like system 
of punishment he had ever seen. In corroboration of Mr. 
Howard (who, however, needs no corroboration) I here 
quote from the above alluded to work of Mr. Erman on 
Kussia: 

" Nijni Novgorod is the point of rendezvous for crimi- 
nals from the western provinces of the empire condemned 
to Siberian exile. They arrive there in small detachments, 
to pursue their journey in large bodies. In the vicinity of 
every post-house along the road is another building known 
as the Ostrog or Fort, which is merely a large barrack 
divided into numerous small chambers, and surrounded by 
a fence of palisades, where the convicts are lodged upon 
the journey. " 



THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 63 

From various passages scattered through Mr. Erman's 
book, it appears that these Siberian exiles are by no means 
so badly treated as has frequently been stated and be- 
lieved. 

In most instances the punishment derives its severity 
less from painful toil or cruel discipline imposed upon 
them, than from the separation from accustomed associa- 
tions. The first caravan of prisoners encountered by Mr. 
Errnan at about several hundred miles beyond Nijni were 
well clothed and cared for, and seemed neither dissatisfied 
with their past journey, nor overwhelmed with care about 
the future. 

" With every train of them are many wagons, drawn by 
post-horses, to carry women and the old, infirm men; the 
rest follow in paths in a long train after the wagons, es- 
corted by a militia established in the villages. It is but 
rarely that one sees special offenders with fetters upon 
their legs during this march. 

" The majority of tales circulated by romancing trav- 
elers with reference to Siberian exile have little founda- 
tion, save in the imagination of the narrators. The great 
majority of the delinquents are condemned only to settle in 
Siberia, and when hard labor in the Uralian mines, and 
in certain manufactories, is superadded, it fs generally for 
a year or other limited/period. Those of the peasant class 
have to support themselves, while offenders of a higher 
rank, and unusued to manual labor, have an allowance 
made them by the Government. They are usually known 
in Siberia by the mild name of ' the unfortunates. ' By a 



64 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

remarkable enactment of the Eussian law (prior to the 
emancipation of the serfs), serfs when transported to Si- 
beria become in all respects as free as any citizen." 

Mr. Erman refers to this with strong approval, and at- 
tributes to it the happiest results. " I have often," he 
says, " heard intelligent and reflecting Eussians mention, 
as an almost inexplicable paradox, that the peasants con- 
demned for crime to become settlers in Siberia, all, with- 
out exception, and in a very short time, change their 
habits, and lead an exemplary life; yet it is certain that a 
sense of the benefit conferred on them by the gift of per- 
sonal f redom is the sole cause of this conversion. Banish- 
ment of criminals subservient to colonization, instead of 
close confinement in penitentiaries, is, indeed, an excel- 
lent feature in the Eussian code, and though the substitu- 
tion of forced labor in mines for the punishment of death 
may be traced back to Grecian example, yet the improving 
of the offender's condition by bestowing on him personal 
freedom is an original as well as an admirable addition of 
a Eussian legislator." 

Mr. Erman is also corroborated by a gentleman who 
claims to be an authority on the subject of Eussia and 
Eussian " Exiles " — Mr. George Kennan. Mr. Kennan, 
in replying to the severe charges of Eussian cruelty to 
prisoners brought forward by Mr. W. J. Armstrong, in a 
public lecture in the Federal Capital, says as follows: 

" I do not see that Mr. Armstrong's letter adds any- 
thing, except his own personal opinion, to the materials 
for a judgment of the exile system which 1 furnished in 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 65 

my lectures. He deals mainly with what he supposes to 
be the moral — or immoral character of the Russian Gov- 
ernment, and that is a subject which 1 have not under- 
taken to discuss, except in its incidental relation to the 
treatment of exiles in Siberia. 

" He says that ' Russia is the monster criminal of the 
nineteenth century. ' That proposition would, 1 think, 
admit of argument, even in the vague and emotional shape 
in which Mr. Armstrong presents it, but I do not see that 
I am, at present, under any obligations to either affirm or 
deny. The only question which has any present interest 
for my hearers or his readers is the question whether or 
not I described truly and fairly the condition of Siberian 
exiles, and the working of the exile system. If I did, I 
succeeded in the only purpose 1 had in view, and if I did 
not, Mr. Armstrong should have devoted some of his time 
and space to the correction of what he believed to be my 
errors. Pleasantry and ironical banter are weak defenses 
against facts, and the denunciation of * monster criminal ' 
is a very inadequate substitute for argument. If 1 mis- 
represented in any respect the treatment of exiles in Si- 
beria, it would have been in order to point out the mis- 
representation. If 1 did not, the force of my statements 
is not broken by jocose allusions to ' April nightingales,' 
' semi-tropical Arcadias/ and ' bucolic ecstasies/ 

" The question of the treatment of exiles in Siberia is 
wholly a question of fact. Mr. Armstrong's opinion of 
the Russian Government has nothing to do with it — inter- 
esting although that opinion may be as an illustration of 
the warping influence of a strong belief upon judgment. 

3 



66 THE HEW ERA IN KUSSlA, 

The exile system is to be tried upon its merits, not upon 
the opinion of any individual with regard to the character 
of Eussian rulers or Kussian officials. What, then, are 
the facts of the case, and what conclusions do they seem to 
fairly justify? 

"1. It has been repeatedly stated by Mr. Armstong's 
clients, the Nihilists, and has been made the principal 
ground of their charge of cruelty against the Eussian Gov- 
ernment, that exiles to Siberia are condemned to an Arctic 
wilderness, which bears about the same relation to Euro- 
pean Eussia that Labrador bears to New England. Is this 
statement supported by the facts or is it not? 

" I presented in the last two of my lectures a great mass 
of circumstantial and detailed evidence to prove that the 
part of Siberia to which more than ninety per cent, of all 
the exiles go, has as warm a summer as Great Britain; 
that it produces annually millions of bushels of wheat and 
potatoes, and hundreds of thousands of pounds of tobacco; 
that it contains 17,000,000 head of live-stock, and could 
export annually 175,000,000 pounds of cattle products; 
that its flora comprises a thousand different kinds of flow- 
ering plants, and that it is in summer the home of more 
than fifty species of singing-birds, including five varieties 
of nightingale. If this evidence is accepted as true, the 
statements of the Nihilists must be rejected as false. I 
gave in all cases the sources from which my information 
was derived, viz., personal observation, the reports of 
scientific expeditions sent out by the Eussian Geographical 
Society, the thermometrical tables of Eussian meterolo- 
gists, and Yadrintsf's ' Siberia as a Colony,' which is not 



THE NEW EKA IN" KUSSIA. 67 

ouly quoted by the eminent Nihilist, Prince Krapotkine, 
with express approval, as a trustworthy authority, but 
which is, in the main, an argument against the exile sys- 
tem. I did not, in a single instance, draw information 
from a source which might be regarded as favorable to the 
Russian Government, or prejudiced against the exiles. 
Mr. Armstrong's only reply to this mass of detailed evi- 
dence is the sneering remark that ' the inhabitants of the 
European portion of the Czar's dominion should be in a 
state of perennial flagrancy with the sheer object of de- 
portation to this earthly paradise. ' 

" 2. The Nihilist and their sympathizers, including Mr. 
Armstrong himself, have represented that the political 
exiles to Siberia are to be counted by hundreds of thou- 
sands, Mr. Armstrong even asserting «that ' 150,000 exiles 
were sent to Siberia in the last year of the reign of Alex- 
ander II. ' I showed by Anoochine's ' Statistical History 
of Russian Crime ' that the exiles sent to Siberia for any 
single year, taking all classes together, never reached 20,- 
000; and that the whole number of State criminals in the 
last twenty-year period covered by Mr. Anoochine's re- 
searches, was only 443. I am further prepared to show, 
by the St. Petersburg Golos, that Mr. Armstrong's state- 
ment of the number of exiles sent to Siberia in the last 
year of Alexander the Second's reign, is too large by more 
than 130,000 — in other words, that his figures are seven 
times overstated! What's wrong here? The St. Peters- 
burg Golos was recently suppressed for its alleged sympa- 
thy with the classes to which a large part of the political 
exiles belong, and can hardly be accused, therefore, of un- 



68 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

derstating the number of exiles in order to aid my ' special 
pleading/ and Mr. Anoochine received for his ' Statistical 
History of Russian Crime ' the gold medal of the Russian 
Geographical Society, which is the highest tribute that 
can be paid to an author's accuracy and trustworthiness* 
In reply to this presentation of facts and authorities, Mr. 
Armstrong has nothing more to say than that I am a 
special pleader with a large case on hand. 

" 3. It had been asserted and reiterated by Russian rev- 
olutionists and their 'sympathizers for more than half a 
century, that political exiles in Siberia are practically dead 
and buried; that they have no communication with the 
world; that they are known only by their numbers; that 
they are chained to wheelbarrows, flogged with the knout, 
and condemned to exhausting labor in underground mines. 
In disproof of these assertions, I quoted the statements of 
political exiles themselves, including Belaiyef, the leader 
of the ' Decembrists,' Piotrofski, one of the leaders of the 
Polish insurrection of 1830, and Chernishefski, one of the 
founders of modern Nihilism, to show that political exiles 
in Siberia are not ill-treated, that they are not chained to 
wheelbarrows, or flogged with the knout, or compelled to 
work in underground mines. I proved by these exiles' own 
letters and published reminiscences that they were uniformly 
well-treated, that their wives were allowed to join" them in 
their places of banishment, that they were permitted to re- 
ceive letters and money from their friends, that they were 
comfortably supported by the Government, that they spent 
their time as they chose, and that they received, through- 
out the period of their exile, even the most liberal of Eu- 



THE NEW EEA IN" .RUSSIA. 69 

ropean newspapers and reviews. 1 showed that the politi- 
cal exiles at the Nerchinsk silver mines, according to their 
own statements, had a library of 3,000 volumes, and I can 
give the list of periodicals that the ' Decembrist ' exiles re- 
ceived regularly from Paris and Berlin. It includes the 
Journal des Debats, the Revue Britannique, Revue des 
deux Mondes, the Preussiche Staatszeitung, the Augsburg 
Gazette, and all the Eussian journals and magazines pub- 
lished in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The terms of exile 
of the six political offenders whom I quoted covered the 
whole of the period from 1825 to 1885. Chernishefski was 
pardoned year before last, and Leon is in Siberia still. I 
indicated in all cases where the statements of these politi- 
cal exiles could be found, and if any doubter will call upon 
me, I will show him the statements and letters. 

" In reply to this presentation of facts, derived wholly 
and solely from the political exiles themselves, Mr. Arm- 
strong says, with impressive relevancy, that ' Eussia is the 
monster criminal of the nineteenth century !' 

" It is hardly necessary to notice his assertion that my 
method of dealing with this subject is a ' class-room 
method/ but it may be pertinent to remark that, inasmuch 
as I have visited Siberia, and talked with the exiles, while 
he has not, my class-room is wider than his, and contains 
more sources of original information. 

" He is in error in saying that Prince Krapotkine made 
the charge relative to the incarceration of exiles in quick- 
silver mines, and he is also in error in saying that I inad- 
vertently admitted the existence of such mines. I made 
no such admission advertently or inadvertently, and Prince 



70 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

Krapotkine has expressly stated in a recent number of the 
Nineteenth Century that quicksilver mines in Siberia do 
not exist. 

" Mr. Armstrong further asserts that ' there is no evi- 
dence in Siberia or elsewhere that can be legitimately or 
even decently adduced to vindicate either the humanity or 
the justice of the Russian Government.' 

" In the school of ethics in which 1 was trained it was 
held to be always right to tell the truth, even when it 
benefited an evil-doer, and always wrong to resort to a lie, 
even to support a good cause. Mr. Armstrong would lay 
down another rule, which has never hitherto been em- 
braced in any code of morals, viz., that when the truth will 
tend to vindicate an accused person, or to lessen the degree 
of his supposed guilt, it ' can not be legitimately or even 
decently adduced;' or to put the case more sharply, if I 
believe that Mr. Armstrong has treated his horse with in- 
human barbarity, in turning him into a waterless pasture, 
and there beating him cruelly with a club, the editor of 
the Chronicle, who is an impartial observer, can not, 
' legitimately or even decently/ bring forward evidence to 
show that Mr. Armstrong carried water to his horse every 
day, and that the beating was done by a bad-tempered 
hired man who was punished for it. In other words, my 
opinion that Mr. Armstrong is a brute should debar any- 
body with a sense of decency from bringing forward evi- 
dence to show that the cruelty to the horse has been exag- 
gerated and misrepresented by Mr. Armstrong's enemies. 
Should the author of this new and remarkable theory of 
rights ever come to be regarded by anybody as an evil-doer, 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 71 

it would be interesting to watch the application of his own 
rule to his own case. 

"Mr. Armstrong says that Siberian exiles were barbarous- 
ly punished by hot irons and the lash a hundred years after 
other governments had outgrown the savagery of penal tort- 
ures. His knowledge of penal administration in other 
countries would seem to be as defective as his knowledge 
of the Siberian exile system is inaccurate. If he will read 
Pike's ' History of Crime in England ' (Smith, Elder & 
Co., London, 1873), and Sir Edmund Du Cane's ' Experi- 
ments in Punishment ' {Nineteenth Century for Novem- 
ber, 1879), he will find that branding, nose-slitting, and 
personal mutilation have been practiced in England as well 
as in Eussia; and that hot irons and cruel flogging were 
authorized by British law as late as the reign of George the 
First. But it is not necessary to go as far back as that for 
instances of cruel torture in England and other countries 
that Mr. Armstrong would probably call civilized. 

" According to the recently published biography of Mrs. 
Elizabeth Fry, the famous Quaker prison reformer, the 
condition of the English prisons as late as 1813 was as bad 
as anything ever charged against the Siberian mines. ' In 
all of them dirt, cruelty, fever, torture, and abuses reigned 
unchecked. The prisons were farmed by their keepers; 
many innocent persons were slowly rotting to death, be- 
cause of their inability to pay the heavy fees exacted, and 
thumb-screws and iron caps were employed to quell turbu- 
lent spirits and to afford amusement to brutal keepers. ' 
(' The Life of Elizabeth Gurney Fry/ by Mrs. E. K. Pit- 
man, Roberts Bros., Boston, 1884.) , 



72 THE NEW ERA Itf RUSSIA. 

" The thumb-screw was used as a means of extorting a 
confession in Austria as recently as July, 1883. (See 
* Trial of Hungarian Jews, London Times, July 20, 1883.) 
The treatment of political prisoners in the Saxon State 
Prison at Halle, as late as 1884, was so cruel and brutal 
that three died therefrom, and a fourth was driven to in- 
sanity. (New York World, May 27, 1884.) As for our 
own country, it is only necessary to read McMaster's re- 
cently published ' History of the People of the United 
States ' to become convinced that we should throw no 
stones. If there is anything more horrible in the annals 
of Siberia than the treatment of prisoners in the jails of 
Massachusetts, and Connecticut in the last quarter of the 
eighteenth century, as described by McMasters, 1 have yet 
to hear of it. 

" But it is not necessary to go back even to the eight- 
eenth century. According to the report of the Assembly 
States Prison Committee of New York, made in 1883, and 
a report of an investigating committee of the Missouri Leg- 
islature, made the same year, prisoners in American State 
prisons, within the last three years, have been punished 
with such instruments of torture as the paddle, the cat, 
the " crucifix," the "yoke," and the "crown," besides 
being hung up by the wrists and thumbs, chained to cell 
walls, and subjected to the terrible, slow torture, of " water 
dropping," until they committed suicide to avoid further 
punishment. According to the report of the Missouri 
Legislative Committee, one prisoner cut his throat while 
an attempt was being made to drag him out of his cell with 
a red-hot iron hook. (See New York Sun, February 23 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 73 

and March 16, 1883, and New York Times, February 24, 
1883.) 

" As for the treatment of prisoners in the convict camps 
of Georgia and Alabama, it is worse than anything ever 
charged against Siberia. Bev. J. B. Anderson, the chap- 
lain of the Alabama Penitentiary, in a statement appended 
to a report of the prison inspectors, says, with hot indigna- 
tion, ' The cruelty to convicts may go on for a time yet, 
but sooner or later the curses of Almighty God will be 
showered down upon this proud commonwealth V 

" In view of these facts, which Mr. Armstrong, in his 
denunciation of the ' monster criminal of the nineteenth 
century ' seems to have overlooked, would it not be well to 
remember the old proverb about people who live in glass 
houses? 

" As for my supposed sympathy with the Eussians, if I 
were, as Mr. Armstrong alleges, a special pleader for the 
Eussian Government, 1 should set forth, as one of the rea- 
sons why Americans ought to treat that government with 
justice the attitude which it took toward the' Government 
of the United States during the darkest and most discour- 
aging period of the war of the rebellion. A Government 
which, as shown by the official records of the American 
.legation in St. Petersburg, stood by us when we needed 
friends in Europe as we may never need them again; a 
Government which persistently refused to entertain the 
propositions made to it by France and England for joint 
intervention; and a Government which, finally, as a token 
of its friendship and good-will, stretched out its hand to 
us in our time of trouble by sending its fleet to the harbor 



74 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

of New York, would certainly seem to have some claim to 
the poor boon of a hearing in the country which it be- 
friended. 

" With all due respect for Mr. Armstrong's earnestness 
and sincerity, and for his presumably extensive and varied 
attainments in other fields of research, I must decline to 
further discuss with him the question of Siberian exile. A 
gentleman who deliberately makes, in a written public ad- 
dress, as Mr. Armstrong made in his lecture on Nihilism 
last winter, such reckless statements as that ' 350,000 
Poles have been driven across the plains of Siberia at the 
point of the bayonet/ and that ' 150,000 exiles were sent 
to Siberia in the last year of the reign of Alexander the 
Second/ has not knowledge enough upon the subject to 
make a discussion with him either profitable or interesting.^ 

Personal experience in Siberia enables me to say that we 
are here giving a truthful picture of the Siberian question. 

It is pertinent here to remark that in Eussia alone of civ- 
ilized countries there is no death penalty, except only for 
high treason. ■ 

The persons condemned to penal servitude in Siberia are, 
first, murderers, burglars, incendiaries, forgers, and others 
found guilty of flagitious crimes against persons or prop- 
erty, whose sentence by Eussian law is for not less than 
three years. As soon as sentence is pronounced the crim- 
inal, no matter his offense, is henceforth known simply as 
an "Exile." 1 wish to call particular attention to this 
point. Even the officers who have him in charge after 
conviction, either en route or after having reached his des- 
tination in Siberia, are not permitted, under a severe pen- 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 75 

alty, to address him, directly or indirectly, as a murderer, 
burglar, etc., but must designate him as an " Exile/ ' 
Thus tender o£ the feelings of the convicted felon is the 
Russian Government, not merely out of a wise policy to re- 
form him, but a genuine and humane respect for his man- 
hood. 

These magazine writers and lecturers who try to preju- 
dice the American people toward the Government of a 
friendly nation, do not hesitate, either from ignorance or 
design, to confound this class of flagitious criminals with 
the prisoners deported for political offenses; because all, 
political prisoners, murderers, etc., alike bear the common 
name of " Exile " and no other. 

From personal knowledge I assert, and challenge refu- 
tation, that if each and every case were examined and laid 
before the American people of the persons deported to Si- 
beria for a term of from three years to life, and living there 
in perfect freedom of action so long as they observe a 
proper regard for disciplinary regulations, it would be 
found there are not two*" Exiles " annually, out of a pop- 
ulation of one hundred and twelve millions, who have been 
sent to Siberia for purely political offenses during the reign 
of Alexander III. And of this small number, there is not 
one, should he present a respectfully couched petition to 
the Emperor, acknowledging his errors, that would not be 
immediately pardoned.* 

* " Ckerniskefski, one of tke founders of modern Nikilism, was 
pardoned a year before last." See Mr. George Kennan's letter, 
page 68. [Mr. Ckerniskefski presented suck a petition to tke Em- 
peror.] 

f 



76 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

The ranting of ignorant and designing men, posing be- 
fore the American people as humanitarians or philanthro- 
pists, and falsely, impudently, asserting that the Russian 
police are " running amuck " among their people like 
maddened Malays, tearing, at their " own sweet will," 
children from the very bosoms of their mothers and deport- 
ing them to Siberia, is a base and wanton insult to one 
hundred and twelve millions of a warlike people who are 
proverbial for their deep and tender attachment to their 
children. On the authority of Mr. George Kennan I as- 
sert, in his own language, that for a period of twenty years 
during the reign of Alexander II. the Great Liberator, 
there were only four hundred and forty-three State crim- 
inals, or political prisoners, sent to Siberia out of a popula- 
tion of one hundred and twelve millions. And these four 
hundred and forty-three, 1 assert, were nobles opposed to 
the emancipation of the serfs, and who were deported to 
Siberia, with scarcely an exception, for plotting treason and 
planning rebellious outbreaks like those of the Decembrists 
of 1825. 

1 have stated in a preceding chapter that the reign of 
Alexander III. is that of peace and prosperity throughout 
the Empire and of the most rapid development of its re- 
sources, with its national policy shaped wholly in accord- 
ance with the wishes and the character of the people. 
This was to be expected from the noble character of the 
reigning Emperor. I have known Alexander III. since 
his early youth, and he is one of the most accomplished, 
liberal, and enlightened monarchs that ever sat upon a 
throne^ he constantly studies the welfare of his people, is 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 77 

high-minded, humane, gentle, and kind, and continually 
strives to ascertain the needs of his subjects, and even now 
stands ready to adopt whatever system of government 
would be most conducive to the welfare of Eussia. For 
these qualities he is almost worshiped by the people, not- 
withstanding all reports to the contrary. 



78 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Poland. 

There are few persons in this country or even in Eng- 
land who have studied the ancient and modern history of 
Poland. Even if they had, a full and accurate under- 
standing thereof would be almost impossible without a 
visit to the country and a full acquaintance with the pecul- 
iar conditions of society prevailing there for hundreds of 
years prior to the " Partition." Without such previous 
conditions of mental enlightenment a very erroneous idea 
of Poland and the Poles would be had. For example: 
Most of the riots and the insurrections in Poland that have 
disturbed the peace of that country since the " Partition ■' 
have been assumed by the English-speaking peoples to be 
the struggle of a brave people to throw off the yoke of a 
foreign tyrant and recover their ancient freedom and the 
constitution of their fathers. This is a romantic but an 
utterly untrue conception of the situation. 1 will briefly 
allude to this subject. 

Mr. Richard Cobden was requested by Lord Dudley 
Stuart, a patron of the Polish refugees in London, to ad- 
dress a meeting to invoke the sympathies of the English 
people on behalf of the Poles in their effort to regain their 
old constitution and their national liberty, and addressed 
the following letter in reply. This letter 1 here quote in 
full: 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 79 

" Of how trifling consequence it must be to the prac- 
tical-minded and humane people of Great Britain, or to 
the world at large, whether Poland be governed by a king 
of this dynasty or of that — whether he be lineally de- 
scended from Boleslas the Great, or of the line of the 
Jagellons — contrasted with the importance of the inquiries 
as to the social and political condition of its people; 
whether they be as well or worse governed, clothed, fed, 
and lodged in the present day as compared with any 
former period; whether the masses of the people be ele- 
vated in the scale of moral and religious beings; whether 
the country enjoys a smaller or larger amount of the bless- 
ing of peace; or whether the laws for the protection of life 
and property are more or less justly administered. These 
are the all-important inquiries about which we busy our- 
selves; and it is to cheat us of our stores of philanthropy, 
by an appeal to the sympathy with which we regard these 
vital interests of a whole people, that the declaimers and 
writers upon the subject invariably appeal to us on behalf 
of the oppressed and enslaved Polish nation — carefully 
obscuring, amid the cloud of epithets about ' ancient free- 
dom/ ' national independence,' ' glorious republic,' and 
the like, the fact that, previously to the dismemberment 
the term nation applied only to the nobles; that, down to 
the partition of their territory, about nineteen out of every 
twenty of the inhabitants were slaves, possessing no right, 
civil or political; that about one in every twenty was a 
nobleman, and that that body of nobles formed the very 
worst aristocracy of ancient or modern times; putting up 
and pulling down their kings at pleasure; passing selfish 



80 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

laws, which gave them power of life and death over their 
serfs, whom they sold and bought like dogs or horses; 
usurping to each of themselves the privileges of a petty 
sovereign, and denying to all besides the meanest rights of 
human beings; and scorning all pursuits as degrading, ex- 
cept that of the sword, they engaged in incessant wars 
with neighboring States, or plunged their own country 
into all the horrors of anarchy, for the purpose of giving 
employment to themselves and their dependents. I hesi- 
tate not, emphatically, to assert, that it was wholly, and 
solely, and exclusively, at the instigation, and for the self- 
ish benefit, of this aristocratic faction of the people, that 
the Polish nation suffered for twelve months the horrors 
of civil war, was thrown back in her career of improve- 
ment, and has since had to endure the rigors of a con- 
queror's vengeance. The Eussian Government was aware 
of this, and its severity has since been chiefly directed to- 
ward the nobility. For this reason I decline to accept 
your invitation. " 

When Poland was ruled by high nobles, called Palatines, 
the great body of the people were slaves; nobody was 
qualified to hold office but the nobility. The few citizen 
burgesses were considered no better than slaves; and not 
even permitted to educate their children. The artisan 
and laborer were slaves belonging to one or the other 
nobleman. The merchants were looked upon as dogs. 
Eeligious tolerance was not permitted. The unfortunate 
Hebrews who settled in Poland were tortured, and not 
even permitted the exercise of their religion. Volumes 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 81 

could be written of the cruelty practiced by the nobility 
of Poland. Manufactories were not permitted. The rich 
fabrics with which the nobles clothed themselves were im- 
ported directly from France. As soon as Eussia tools pos- 
session of the country it abolished all this oppression «and, 
^in a degree, protected those slaves, established educational 
institutions, granted religious tolerance, encouraged manu- 
factories, imported artisans from England, France, and 
Germany into Poland in order to promote manufacturing 
and commerce; and, with one stroke of the pen, the late 
lamented Alexander II. freed six million of Polish slaves 
who were kept in bondage and servitude by their own 
countrymen, and to-day Poland, under the Russian rule, 
is a prosperous manufacturing country, its slaves free, and 
placed upon the same footing as their former tyrannical 
Palatine. There has been a great deal said and written 
about the " liberty-loving " Poles, and all of it is pure fic- 
tion. Prior to the partition, the quarrelsome and meddle- 
some nobles made war upon the merest pretext, and then 
raised the inspiring battle-cry of " liberty and religion," 
which lured whole multitudes of their classes to their 
own destruction. Since the partition, the nobles have 
taken every opportunity to impose upon the poor, unsus- 
pecting people, who regarded them as leaders. One of the 
customs established for this purpose, and maintained until 
the abolition of serfdom in the Empire, was for the noble- 
men to sell the privilege of working for wages to their en- 
slaved countrymen in order to obtain money. As an ex- 
ample of their tyranny : 
A large Polish landed proprietor and extensive slave- 



82 THE NEW EEA IN RUSSIA. 

owner, who spent most of his time in Paris or at the gam- 
ing-tables of Weisbaden, Homburg, and Baden-Baden, 
gave a license to one of his slaves at the rate of ten rubles 
per month to work for himself in the cities. This slave 
entered one of the factories which were established by the 
encouragement of the Russian Government, where, by skill 
and industry, he became perfect in the art of weaving, and 
the salary which he received was fifty rubles per month. 
His " liberty-loving " master, who, it afterward was ascer- 
tained, belonged to a Polish society in Paris and had con- 
spired against the so-called tyranny of the Eussian Gov- 
ernment, lost a large amount of money gambling. He 
wrote to his agent to send him more. Not receiving the 
same quickly, he returned to Poland to know the cause. 
There he raised the cost of license to all his slaves who had 
the privilege to work in cities. Among them he found 
this particular case of his slave receiving fifty rubles per 
month. He immediately taxed him for the license thirty 
rubles, leaving him twenty rubles. When the slave's em- 
ployers found this out they raised his salary to seventy-five 
rubles. This " noble Pole " then increased the cost of 
the license to fifty rubles, whereupon the poor slave appeared 
before the noble wretch and stated that as he had been 
married and had children he could not pay so much. 
This so enraged the nobleman that he ordered his econom 
(or overseer) to give the slave fifty lashes for his impu- 
dence. The poor slave was finally compelled to pay the 
amount. His employers, who were Germans, hearing of 
this treatment, raised his salary to a, hundred rubles per 
month, and then the nobleman ordered him to pay eighty 



THE NEW EEA IN RUSSIA. 83 

rubles per month for the license. In the course of time 
the unfortunate slave was taken sick and could not pay. 
The nobleman sent for him, and, administering a sound 
thrashing, asked him the cause. On his knees he pleaded 
illness, to which the " noble Pole " replied: " If you are 
not able to work, then go. and rob the churches of their 
silver plate; sell it and bring me the money." At last 
this relentless, wretched nobleman came to grief. The 
Eussian authorities had ascertained that he was an arch- 
conspirator, and when upon trial the story of how he 
treated his slaves was introduced with such good effect 
that there was none so base as to plead against sendiDg 
him to Siberia. 

It will be seen from all this that the cry of Eussian 
tyranny over suffering Poland is absolutely without foun- 
dation. The rule of the Eussian Government has been of 
incalculable benefit to the entire people of Poland, and its 
benefits were not confined to a class. As an evidence of 
the appreciation of its beneficent rule there is an obelisk 
in the Polish capital, Warsaw, on which is inscribed in let- 
ters of gold, " To the memory of Alexander I., the bene- 
factor of Poland. " And this inscription is no exaggera- 
tion. 



84 THE NEW EEA IN KUSSIA. 



CHAPTEE IX. 
Stepniak and the Persecution of the Jews. 

Besides the American magazine writer there is another 
source whence the American people are supplied with Rus- 
sian horrors. That is the English press. Chief among 
these Anglican manufacturers of Russian outrages is the 
London Times. Of course these alleged fabrications have 
the same foundation as the Times' s accusation against the 
Irish Home Rule party generally, in a reckless mendacity. 
Mr. Stepniak, the arch " Nihilist," is in the employ of 
the Times, his specialty being Russian subjects, and when 
a fresh supply of Siberian horrors, or " administrative proc- 
ess barbarities " is required, Mr. Stepniak can always be 
depended on to furnish it in whatever quantity or quality 
desired. This man Stepniak is one of much mental 
ability, but holds views antagonistic to the safety of all 
organized society. He has elaborated, and is now zealous- 
ly advocating a theory of government which he professes 
to desire to see established in Russia. ~ Of this theory it is 
sufficient to say that it has been condemned by every court 
in Europe, and wherever promulgated has received the un- 
qualified disapprobation of all law-abiding people. As an 
instance of the unfitness of those theories for any civilized 
people let me mention the following: 

Prince Krapotkine, the " Eminent Nihilist," went to 
Republican France. He is an ardent supporter of Step- 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 85 

niak's governmental ideas. He made a speech at Lyons, 
expounding and strongly indorsing these particular doc- 
trines. For this speech he was arrested, tried, convicted, 
and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. The court de- 
cided that the doctrines he advocated were dangerous to 
the public safety, detrimental to good morals, subversive 
of law and order, and their public discussion and advocacy 
could result only in debauching and corrupting the public 
virtue. This was in Kepublican France, and not in so- 
called despotic Russia. 

From, this simple fact it can be seen how worthy of 
trust, confidence, or sympathy are these Anarchists and 
conspirators against Russia's domestic peace, even suppos- 
ing that the majority of those sent to Siberia were really 
sent there for the sole reason that they advocated such 
theories. I have shown, however, that nearly all those 
" Exiles " are deported to Siberia, not for advocating 
political views, but for the commission of gross and hei- 
nous crimes, and conspiring against the lives and property 
of the citizens. 

I do not desire to discuss Mr. Stepniak's private charac- 
ter, nor the crimes with which he is charged with having 
committed in Russia, and for which he had to leave that 
Empire, but if they are thoroughly investigated and made 
known to the American people, the latter would at once 
condemn him not merely as untrustworthy, but as not a 
credible witness against the Government of Russia, or the 
manner in which the laws of the Empire are executed. 
The magazine writer and the platform lecturer on " Si- 
berian horrors " laud Mr. Stepniak as a patriot, but his 



86 THE NEW EEA IN EUSSIA. 

sole claim to that title in their judgment is his past crim- 
inal conduct and his supplying them at present with details 
of manufactured Russian outrages. -The primary source 
from which Mr. Stepinak gets the basis on which he 
weaves his fabricated tissue of alleged outrages committed 
in Russia, which fabrications he famishes the English- 
speaking world through the medium of the London Times 
and certain newspaper correspondents, is first from per- 
sons alleging themselves to be escaped prisoners from 
Siberia, who invariably pose as " politicals," and, second- 
ly, from an " underground railroad " communication with 
the so-called " politicals " still in Siberia. The credulity 
with which these manufactured outrages are received by 
Americans would be a subject for amusement were it 
not a matter of amazement. Take the character of these 
alleged outrages. 

For example: It is alleged that at Irkutsk several hun- 
dred prisoners, male and female, leagued together and 
made a vow to starve themselves to death 1 to escape the in- 
fernal horrors of the situation. They proceeded to execute 
their vow. The regulations for the government of the 
prisoners provide for a stated visit by them to the police 
department where they are stationed. As this particular 
number of prisoners failed to comply with this particular 
regulation, members of the police called at the house 
where they were assembled and ordered them to report at 
headquarters. The prisoners were armed, and fired on 
the police. The latter retired; the Governor was notified, 
who repaired to the scene of disturbance accompanied by a 
company of Cossacks. The prisoners mentioned had bar- 



THE NEW EKA IN KUSSIA. 87 

ricaded themselves in their house. The Cossacks tore 
down the barricades, when the prisoners fired a volley at 
their assailants, killing the Governor. The Cossacks im- 
mediately opened fire, a battle ensued, and the prisoners 
were subdued, not without some of them having been 
killed. 

This story will not bear analysis for a moment. It is a 
clumsily concocted fabrication of the " blood-and-thunder " 
order. If the prisoners found life insupportable, why did 
they not, as they were armed, resort to the quicker 
method of shooting themselves instead of to the lingering 
and infinitely more painful method of starving themselves 
to death? The whole story is very clumsily done; its 
bungling character shows that the fabricators of these 
yarns believe the American people will accept anything as 
Gospel truth if it have enough blood and horror in it. 

A second alleged outrage is as follows: A Madame 
Sekida was a political prisoner in the Kara mines. She 
was called before the governor or police chief of that sta- 
tion, and on appearing before him struck him in the face 
and attempted to kill him. For this action she was 
condemned to be flogged, and did receive twenty-five 
lashes. 

Now, there are no political prisoners sent to the mines 
at Kara. None but the most vicious and desperate crim- 
inals, such as murderers, burglars, etc., are sent to this 
station. This fact itself, forgotten or overlooked by the 
outrage manufacturers, shows that there is an attempt to 
make capital out of a simple criminal proceeding. Even 
granting that it is all true as stated, what would be done 



88 THE NEW ERA IN! RUSSIA. 

in this country or England with a prisoner who defied the 
court, assaulted the judge, and tried to kill him? They 
also forgot that in Eussia punishment by the lash is strictly 
forbidden by law, except in cases to enforce absolutely nec- 
essary discipline among the most dangerous class of pris- 
oners. 

With regard to the Irkutsk revolt and the murder of 
the governor, supposing that the events did occur, the 
question naturally arises, What would be done under such 
circumstances by American or English authorities? 
Would not the entire force of the station be exerted to its 
fullest extent, with very little regard to consequences, to 
put down such a revolt? We see every day in this country 
persons who are simply arrested on suspicion of a misde- 
meanor, and who, for merely trying to get away from the 
officer arresting them, are shot down or mercilessly 
clubbed. How much heavier a punishment, then, would 
be inflicted on a gang of prisoners at one of our peniten- 
tiaries who should revolt, kill the warden and the guards, 
and defiantly disregard the laws? And would any maga- 
zine writer condemn the American authorities for severely 
punishing such a revolt? 

There occurred lately in this country an " outrage '> 
that equals in despotic severity anything ever told of the 
Russian horrors. It was a " political " outrage, more^ 
over. In November, 1890, a meeting of " politicals " — 
that is to say, of Anarchists or " Nihilists " — was at- 
tempted to be held in Newark, N. J. The New York 
Herald the next day came out with such flaming head- 
lines as — 



the new era in russia. 89 

"Police Clubs for Anarchists' Heads." 

" Captain Glori Felled by a Coward from Behind, 

but it took his men no tlme to revenge the 

Assault by Thumping the Pates of the 

Rioters until Blood Flowed. " 

" Nine of the Ringleaders Thrown into Cells 

and Held Without Bail." 

The Herald then gives a column describing the sum- 
mary breaking up of the meeting by the police. 1 quote 
the following passages: 

" Persistent attempts by Mrs. Lucy Parsons, the widow 
of the executed Anarchist Parsons, to make an inflamma- 
tory speech to a crowd of nearly two thousand persons in 
Newark last night precipitated a riot. 

" The police used their clubs with terrible effect, besides 
arresting Mrs. Parsons and nine of the leaders of the An- 
archistic crowd on charges of inciting the trouble. 

" The crowd became threatening, but within five min- 
utes about forty policemen arrived in patrol wagons and 
charged the rioters with drawn clubs. Many heads were 
hit and split by the heavy night-sticks, and there was a 
wild scramble to get away. 

" The prison of the 4th precinct station rang with the 
shouts of the crazed Anarchists. They laughed and sang, 
and were glad to talk. Particularly voluble was Simon 
Gerdon, who is a young Russian: 

" ' I am a Russian Nihilist/ he said. ' You call this a 
free country; but it isn't. The Constitution of the United 
States grants every one the right of free speech, but you 



90 THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 

don't have it. A police captain has power enough to over- 
ride that glorious document. He has more power than 
the Czar of Russia. ' " 

" The clothing of several of the prisoners was covered 
with blood a which flowed from cuts on their heads, the 
results of taps with clubs. They were anxious to be re- 
leased on bail. This was refused to them." 

Now, this Newark scene, as quoted from the Herald, 
equals in cruel and despotic police action, in the applica- 
tion of the administrative process by refusing bail to the 
prisoners, and in invading the rights of" politicals/ ' any- 
thing ever written by Mr. George Kennan, or Mr. Step- 
niak, of Russian outrages. More than that. The prison- 
ers, who were cut about the heads by the clubs of the 
police till their clothing was covered with their blood, were 
not even given surgical attendance, but were left welter- 
ing in their gore all night. 

Has Mr. Kennan anything to say in condemnation of 
this " outrage " on American citizens? For the same, or 
less than the same, he has bitterly denounced the Russian 
authorities. Is that a crime and an infamy in Russia 
which in this country is right and commendable? What 
has he and other magazine writers to say about the arrest- 
ed Russian Nihilist's declaration that " a police captain in 
America has more power than the Emperor of Russia 
has in Russia?" I cordially endorse the action of the 
police in Newark on the occasion referred to above, as 1 
endorse all action in favor of law and order, but I wish to 
call the attention of the American people to the declara- 



THE NEW EEA IN KUSSIA. 91 

tion of a Russian Nihilist that he found in this country a 
police captain had more power than the Emperor of Russia 
had in his country. And with this 1 close the subject. 

Notwithstanding the frequent magazine articles and 
itinerant lectures about the cruelty of the Russian authori- 
ties to political prisoners, the internal improbability of the 
stories thus told, taken in conjunction with the unquestion- 
able fact that the people of Russia under the beneficent 
reign of Alexander 111. are happy, prosperous, and law- 
abiding, has had its effect upon thinking people, and a 
smile of incredulity, even of weariness, has gradually be- 
gun to replace the inquiring interest which at first greeted 
these stories. Mr. Stepniak, the brains of this outrage 
business, saw that, like Othello, his occupation would soon 
be gone unless he invented another and fresher kind of 
outrage; and the character of this presented itself to his 
mind very speedily. What was its character is indicated 
by the sudden and terrible stories told of the horrible 
persecutions to which the Jews were so abruptly subjected 
in Russia. 

The world first heard of these amazing cruelties some 
time after the submission to the Emperor of General Igna- 
tieff's proposed law on the better regulation of the Jews in 
the Empire, that is to say, to remove as far as possible the 
wide divergencies in customs, manners, &c, existing be- 
tween the Jews and the Russians, to homogenize them, so 
to speak, with the great bulk of the Empire's subjects. 
This was in 1882. The proposed law was not accepted. 
But Mr. Stepniak saw his opportunity to arouse the indig- 
nation of a liberal age by playing upon its sympathies and 



92 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

ignorance. Eussia is a far-off country, and the means that 
other countries have of getting accurate information as 
to the doings of that government and people, are not so per- 
fected as they are in Western Europe and the United 
States. The " atrocious persecution " of the Jews in Rus- 
sia was given to the world in piecemeal, until finally in the 
beginning of 1890, mankind was horrified to learn that a 
wholesale order of banishment, proscription, and confisca- 
tion was issued by the Eussian Government against that 
class of its subjects. 

Naturally enough the question was asked by almost 
everybody if this news was really true, and if so, what was 
the motive underlying it. In the United States Congress 
a resolution was introduced by Mr. Charles S. Baker, of 
New York, calling upon the President to interfere on be- 
half of the persecuted people as far as international court- 
esy would permit. Upon the Secretary of State devolved 
the duty of executing these wishes of Congress, and he did 
so with his accustomed promptness and thoroughness. 
His report stated there was absolutely no truth in the 
stories — that no thought had ever been given to the perse- 
cution of the Jews in Eussia. For satisfactory reasons the 
Eussian Government had determined to issue regulations 
of a purely domestic character in the interests of industry, 
and the Jews as well as all other classes of Eussian sub- 
jects were affected by them. This, however, was a matter 
purely within the scope of a Government, and it was one' 
with which other nations had nothing whatever to do. 

Mr. Blaine's report settled, once for all, the talk about 
Eussian persecution of the Jews. As, however, a number 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 93 

of these Russian Jews have come to this country in the 
last two or three years, a few words about them as they 
live in Russia will be apropos. 

The Jews in the Russian Empire are peculiarly clannish 
and conservative. They adhere with remarkable tenacity 
to mediaeval customs, habits, even modes of thought. 
Throughout the Empire those of the Jews who are subur- 
ban or rural in their residences are distributed chiefly along 
the frontiers, though they also are to be found in the in- 
terior in the small towns. The great bulk of them avoid 
large cities. Living, therefore, on the frontiers mostly, 
they have opportunities for smuggling which so acute and 
clannish a people could utilize to a great extent. And 
this they have done. Almost every Jew on the frontiers 
of Russia is a smuggler. To break up the system of de- 
frauding the revenue it has been found necessary tt> order 
that they be distributed at points remoter from the fron- 
tiers. This is the only " persecution " that the Jews have 
been subjected to in Russia. No restriction whatever is 
placed on the exercise of their religious belief. To one 
who is acquainted with Russia it is the height of absurdity 
to speak of the Russian Government persecuting people for 
religion's sake. There is no country in the world, not 
even the United States, where there is greater religious 
freedom than in Russia. The Government is heartily in 
favor of having the Jews adopt the advice of the great He- 
brew philanthropist, Baron De Hirsch, who counsels them 
to assimilate with the Christians not only in Russia but 
throughout the world, as their co-religionists have done in 
France, England, and the United States. In other words, 



94 THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 

he counsels them to renounce their mediaeval customs, 
obey the laws, and, while preserving their religion to the 
utmost, to become Russian citizens just as Hebrews in the 
United States, while ardent Israelites in religion, are loyal 
and earnest and thoroughly nationalized Americans as cit- 
izens. There is no persecution for religion's sake, let it be 
distinctly understood, in Eussia. 

This Jew question in Russia is a very difficult one in- 
deed, and one not fully understood outside that Empire. 
It must be remembered that the Russian Jew (except in 
very rare cases, chiefly among many of the students of the 
universities, where he is frequently an Anarchist and an in- 
fidel) holds himself aloof from all races but his own. He 
will not even eat from the same plate as his neighbor of 
another religion, and considers all others than himself as 
heathens. They even have a peculiar language of 
their own, which they use among themselves, and con- 
sider it a sin to speak Russian in their own house- 
holds. The intense narrow and bigoted character 
of the Russian and Polish Jew is well known by 
American Hebrews, who hold no sympathy with their 
brethren of the Russian Empire, except, of course, a relig- 
ious one. The American or French or English Hebrew is 
a bright-minded, liberal, progressive citizen of the country 
he resides in. He holds fast to the dogmas of his faith, 
but he does not wish to carry into his private or social life 
the customs and manners of the tenth or the twelfth cent- 
ury. This last is what the Russian and Polish Jew does, 
and with his inveterate disposition to engage in smuggling 
and his merciless tendency as an usurer, he causes a great 



THE NEW ERA IK RUSSIA. 95 

deal of thought to the Russian statesman. So numerous as 
the Jew is in that Empire, and living in such exclusive 
clannishness, it will be seen that the problem of dealing 
with and assimilating him to his fellow Russian subjects is 
a perplexing one indeed. Let the Jew in Russia assimi- 
late with his fellow-subject, as the Hebrew does in the 
United States, and he will be treated not only well by the 
Russian Government, but with marked favor. For the 
Russian Jew, like his Hebrew co-religionist everywhere, is 
quick-witted, shrewd, temperate, a man of unusual com- 
mercial intelligence, is readily susceptible of the highest 
culture, and, when progressive, as in England and Amer- 
ica, 'makes the most desirable of citizens. Until the Rus- 
sian Jew, however, does assimilate himself to his fellow- 
citizen, it can not be expected that he will not be closely 
watched by a government of which he makes no effort to 
become a progressive citizen. 

Recurring to Mr. Stepniak, and noting the fact that he 
is loud in his professions of being a true Russian patriot, an 
ardent lover of his country and his people, it seems strange 
that he goes away from that country and settles in another 
which is most inimical to his own, where he predicts and plots 
the disruption and destruction of the Russian "Empire. If 
he were in reality what he professes to be he would un- 
doubtedly return to his country, attach himself to the Na- 
tional Progressive party, which in Russia is the Imperialist 
Party, and by all legitimate means endeavor, as every true 
Russian in the past has done, every true Russian in the 
present is doing, to render assistance to the Imperial Gov- 
ernment in its great work of educating and elevating the 



96 THE NEW EEA IN EUSSIA. 

masses, and developing the resources of the Empire. 
Under the beneficent reign of Alexander III. this truly 
great work is being carried on vigorously — ay, magnifi- 
cently. With serfdom abolished, with the jurisprudence 
of the Empire remodeled to meet the requirements of an 
advanced thought and an enlightened age, the most admir- 
able progress marks the course of the Emperor's efforts in 
behalf of his people and his Empire. To aid in the great 
work is, as I have said, the duty of every true Eussian pa- 
triot. Mr. Stepniak* s failure to do so is inexplicable, if he 
really is honest in proclaiming himself a sincere Eussian 
patriot. The gross inconsistency between his professions 
and .his actions, however, compels me to read between the 
lines. And the result of my reading will doubtless be in- 
teresting to both Mr. Stepniak and to the American people. 
It will also explain why the "United States and Eastern 
Asia have been the selected theater for the exhibition of 
" Nihilistic " literature. 

Mr. Stepniak is aware, no doubt, that the English have 
translated and are still translating into all the Oriental lan- 
guages all his manufactured outrage stories, as well as 
those of his imitator and disciple, Mr. Kennan, and are 
distributing them by the ton over Asia, particularly India 
and Central Asia. Immense quantities of this literature 
are also put broadcast all over the United States. The ob- 
ject of this literary activity of the English in this direction 
is to arouse in the people of the United States, of Central 
Asia, and of India a hatred of Eussia, a dislike of her peo- 
ple and her laws, and a distrust for their own personal and 
pecuniary security in that Empire as shall operate to pre- 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 97 

vent free commercial intercourse between the different na- 
tions and check the growing manufacturing and commer- 
cial progress of Russia. For the commercial and manu- 
facturing industries of the Russian Empire are developing 
with great rapidity. She is attracting to herself the trade 
of Central Asia and India, to the exclusion of the English, 
while the United States and Eussia are fast becoming val- 
uable customers in trade of each other. To so frighten 
the merchants of Central Asia, the princes and traders of 
India, and to so awaken the indignation of America at 
these repeated instances of Russian cruelty that practically 
all intercourse will be abandoned between these countries, 
and England left without a rival, is the object of scatter- 
ing broadcast these documents. For if these stories should 
be believed the fear of the insecurity of capital and of the 
danger to life in Russia, the primary foundation of com- 
merce, would efficiently prevent foreign merchants trusting 
their lives or money in Russian hands. If this wily 
scheme of English diplomacy had been successful, the 
United States would have been shut out of a growing and 
valuable market. It failed, however — failed not only with 
the East but with the United States. For at the last great 
fair at Nijni Novgorod there were exhibited cutlery from 
Connecticut and shirtings from Atlanta, Ga., in active 
competition with the hardware of Sheffield and the cottons 
of Manchester. So Mr. Stepniak, on the one hand, and 
Mr. Kennan on the other, have failed in their efforts to 
aid the English manufacturers in the " patriotic " effort 
to injure their own countries by checking their trade and 
arresting their industrial development. 

4 



98 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

So also have their efforts failed to deter merchants and 
other traders of Central Asia and India from trading with 
Eussia. On the contrary the commercial intercourse be- 
tween these countries was never so brisk as now, and in a 
short time Eussia will monopolize the whole trade of the 
Orient to the exclusion of her wily and unscrupulous rival, 
England, notwithstan<jing the efforts of that " true Eus- 
sian patriot," Mr. Stepniak, to aid the latter against his 
own country. 

There is one example of an honest man to whom 1 call 
Mr. Stepniak 's attention. 

Tikhomiroff, one of the conspirators to the assassination 
of the late lamented Alexander II., and the only one that 
escaped, made his way as rapidly as possible to Paris, where 
he became the chief of the Nihilists gathered in that capi- 
tal. Such were his ability, his daring, and his energy that 
Stepniak himself acknowledged him the leader of the Ni- 
hilists. Tikhomiroff was the center of all Nihilistic move- 
ment from Paris, and continued to be so until 1888. In 
that year he issued an address to his followers, publicly re- 
nouncing his Anarchistic principles, acknowledging their 
fallacy, and calling upon his Eussian followers to abandon 
their doctrines, confess their errors, and henceforth devote 
themselves to the cause of progressive liberalism in Eussia 
as represented by the Emperor and the Imperialist Party. 
He said: " I am convinced now that the best, in fact, the 
only practicable, government for Eussia is the one now 
established, which is in accordance with the genius of the 
people and the only one calculated to elevate their condi- 
tion and secure their happiness. The errors into which 1 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 99 

have fallen I acknowledge and repent. They are destruc- 
tive to the very ends I sought to attain. " 

Tikhomiroff addressed a petition to the Emperor of Rus- 
sia, confessing his errors, expressing repentance, and ask- 
ing permission to return to Russia, where he promised to 
live in strict harmony with the laws and to devote himself 
to the Emperor's will. The wise and merciful qualities of 
Alexander 111. were exemplified in his granting Tikhomi- 
rofFs prayer, and the latter is now living in Russia, an ar- 
dent friend of the Government he once sought to over- 
throw. 

Does Mr. Stepniak think this example one worthy to be 
followed, that it exhibits " true patriotism?" 



100 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 



CHAPTER X. 

The "Propagandists" in Russia. — The Student's 
Assassination. — Central Nihilistic Committee. — 
Count Leo Tolstoi, etc. 

In Chapter IV. of this work, I say, speaking of the 
national policy* of the reigning Emperor, Alexander III., 
that it took him but a little while after his ascension to 
the throne to find that certain reforms inaugurated in 
Russia prior to his reign were made on the line of Western 
European thoughts, diverging from the Russian national 
and natural idea, and were, in consequence of such diver- 
gence, practically failures. I said that the Emperor very 
soon grasped the great truth that Russia, by pursuing a 
policy on such lines of development, would be only an imi- 
tator, and would meet the inevitable fate of imitators — 
ruin. The only true policy for Russia, Alexander sa*W, 
was the national and racial one. She must work out her 
destiny after the Russian fashion, and not pattern after a 
Teutonic or a Latin model. 

After fully surveying the field and adopting what he 
considered to be the true policy, Alexander III. proceeded 
in a similar manner to that adopted by Nicholas, to purify 
the Empire from the taint of foreign ideas that had crept 
into the country through the efforts of a seditious class of 
citizens actuated by no genuine love of their country. 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 101 

The evil effects of these ideas were already disastrously 
seen in various parts of the Empire. Alexander insists 
that it is essential for the true development of Eussia's re- 
sources, and for the evolution of the highest and best form 
of civilization that she 'can attain, that a country having 
eight millions of square miles and one hundred and twelve 
millions of people should develop originality in her growth, 
and not pattern after any other. No matter how admira- 
ble may be other forms of civilization, or how valuable 
other methods of thought, their chief value lies in their 
adaptability to the wants and needs of the people who ap- 
ply them. If they are not spontaneous, if they do not 
spring from the national mind and flourish in the national 
heart, then they are exotic and not adapted to the necessi- 
ties of the people. Foreign habits and foreign ideas, as a 
rule, are distasteful to a people on whom they are forced, 
as they are clearly unsuitable. 

Alexander has, during the few years of his reign, made 
Russia for Eussians. This great aud truly national idea 
has become the cardinal doctrine of Eussian political faith, 
and the national party to-day in Eussia is the Imperial 
party. The doctrines of that party are that a progressive 
and liberal government, having for its sole object the wel- 
fare of the people, is the government for Eussia. But 
these ideas are all strictly within the plane of Eussian na- 
tional and racial development. 

I need not remind the intelligent student of history that 
all national development— in other words, all national civ- 
ilization — to be enduring and valuable must spring from 
within a people and be the growth <Ji that people's genius. 



102 THE NEW ERA IN" EUSSIA. 

The records of the past teach one unvarying lesson — that 
the adoption by one race or people of the peculiar national 
civilization of another is attended invariably with disaster 
and ruin. The propensity to adopt the customs, man- 
ners, institutions and ideas of other peoples was the sole 
reason that the brilliant and quick-witted Kelt never 
established any great and enduring commonwealth purely 
and distinctly Keltic. We can cite as many parallels as 
there are nations adopting the exotic idea of development. 
Persia fell from her lofty eminence because she sought to 
change the ancient Persian development for the Egyptian, 
the Assyrian, the Lydian, and the Greek. Greece herself 
was invincible and indisputably supreme so long as the old 
Hellenic natural growth was not replaced by foreign imi- 
tations. This is true not only of Greece collectively, but 
of each Grecian State individually. So long as the laws of 
Lycurgus (which were indeed but the natural expression of 
native Lacedaemonian genius) were observed, so long was 
Sparta easily the first of Grecian autonomies and the domi- 
nant power of the world. Macedon was conquered not so 
much by Eoman arms as by adopting African and Asiatic 
ideas. Eome developed in the most peculiar and indi- 
vidual way her native civilization, and under its influence 
conquered the world. Not until she strove to adopt 
Grecian and Syrian ideas as a part of her growth did she 
fall a prey to the barbarian. So with the Teutonic tribes. 
Tbe Goth, the Vandal, the Lombard tried to become 
Eomans, and of course yielded to the Frank, the only 
Teutonic race that on the Continent came into contact 
with the Romans and yet remained true to itself . The 



THE NEW ERA IH RUSSIA. 103 

French and the modern Germans are the lineal descend- 
ants of the Franks, and are powerful to-day because they 
have grown in civilization on the national and natural 
Frank idea. They have never sought to imitate foreign 
nations. The Saracens held the balance of the world 
against the Teutons so long as they continued to be Sara- 
cens, but when they patterned after their neighbors the 
indomitable riders of the Desert found themselves no 
match for Karl Martel and his shaggy Franks, or for 
Roger Guiscord and his Normans. So with the Turk. 
The latter was a standing menace to all the worlds until 
he went after the " strange gods " of a foreign and there- 
fore unsuitable civilization. But why cite examples? 
History is full of them. 

Not only does a people subject itself to decay and ruin, 
considered in a national sense, by refusing to allow its own 
natural and racial genius to develop and adopts the ideas 
of a foreign race, but it destroys the virtue and the happi- 
ness of its individual members. The imitator fails always 
in attaining the virtues or the graces of his model; but he 
is invariably successful in making his own the vices and 
the defects of his pattern. True indeed is it, not only in 
religion, but in ethnics, that " each must work out his 
own salvation.'' 

So strong indeed is this great truth felt by the masses 
of the people, that there is never an instance on record 
where a people of its own impulse — the masses of a j)eo- 
ple, that is to say — sought to abandon its racial principle 
of growth to adopt that of a foreign race. The pressure 
must come both from without and within, and within 



104 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

from those in authority powerful enough to triumph over 
natural instinct. 

This will explain why the policy of Alexander 111. is so 
popular with the masses of the Eussian people. It is their 
policy. It is the expression of their own racial impulses. 
Under his wise and beneficent rule the Eussian people are 
growing rapidly in the development of this peculiar Rus- 
sian civilization, just as the Eoman people developed a 
peculiar Eoman civilization from the time of the expulsion 
of the Kings to the date of the Civil War — a period which 
covers the best of peculiar Eoman history and during 
which Eoman character reached its highest and grandest 
and strongest development. As the Eoman leaders, with 
few exceptions, in all this long period sought to foster and 
encourage this genuinely Eoman development, so Alexan- 
der III. seeks to foster and promote the growth of a genu- 
inely Eussian character, developed to the highest degree of 
civilization of which it is capable. 

For this reason the efforts of the so-called Eussian 
" Propagandists " — the men who seek to ingraft upon the 
Eussian character the peculiarities and characteristics of 
foreign peoples — who seek to change the Eussian racial 
system of government for a Teutonic or a bastard Latin 
one — for this reason, 1 say, their efforts are confessedly a 
failure — an egregious failure. And they have dropped 
the policy of peaceably seeking to convert by argument for 
the bloody system of dynamite and sharpened steel to be 
applied by assassins imported from without. The Eussian 
masses are perfectly satisfied with their government and 
Us laws — for it is theirs, the growth of their wants and 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 105 

needs, the exponent of their character, the instrument of 
their destiny. Thus satisfied, and the supreme executive 
power lodged in the hands of an Emperor whom they re- 
vere as a child does its father, the Russian people will 
have none of the " Propaganda " — that seeks to tear down 
their own dwelling and force them into an abode totally 
unfit for their necessities aud distasteful to their wishes. 
And this brings me to a consideration of the so-called Rus- 
sian "Propagandists." Let it be understood distinctly 
that " Nihilism," as an organized institution, recognized 
as such by Nihilistic leaders, does not to-day exist in the 
Russian Empire. Hence all efforts of the " Propaganda " 
are directed from without the Empire. What was the 
object of the "Propaganda" prior to the destruction of 
organized Nihilism in Russia and what the character of 
the " Propagandists," I will very briefly sketch. It is how- 
ever necessary to a full and clear understanding of the 
subject that the state of society in Russia among all 
classes of the people for the past generation be depicted. 

The Russian people are divided in commoners and no- 
bility — the latter again into the petty nobility and the 
great nobility. 

The commoners include: First, all the liberated serfs 
who form the vast bulk of the farmers and farm-laborers: 
Secondly, the artisans and manual laborers who were not 
serfs, who were designated as the " common people," but 
who were practically on the same footing with the serfs: 
Thirdly, all manufacturers, bankers, traders, or mer- 
chants, of whatever grade. All distinction in grade be- 
tween these classes, since the Decree of Emancipation was 



106 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

ordered, is practically abolished, and for the sake of con- 
venience in phraseology I designate them as the common- 
ers. They constitute, emphatically and in reality, the 
masses of the Russian people. 

The petty nobility include all those (and their descend- 
ants) who formerly owned few serfs and small holdings of 
land. The great nobles include the descendants of the 
ancient and original Russian nobility, and those who were 
large land and serf owners prior to Emancipation, and 
their descendants; also those who have earned by merit 
high and distinguished rank in the diplomatic, military, 
and naval services. The great nobles form a distinct class 
from the petty noblity, and must not be confounded with 
the latter. Before the law, however, since the Decree of 
Emancipation was ordered, all classes — commoners, petty 
nobles, and the great nobles alike — are equal, neither class 
enjoying privileges not fully possessed by the others. 
| To fully understand Russian society a man must be 
fully acquainted with the habits, manners and aspirations 
of all these three classes 1 have mentioned. There is no 
other country in the world, save the United States and 
France, where there is so general and intense a desire on 
the part of the social inferior to ascend in the social scale 
as in Russia, and to imitate so far as possible the mode of 
life of the social superior. Perhaps the strongest feeling in 
the breast of a Russian, whether commoner, or petty or 
great noble, is the desire to raise his children in the high- 
est and loftiest manner possible, to make of them ex- 
amples of learning, accomplishments and virtues. Love 
for his children is the dominant sentiment in the breast of 



THE NEW EKA IN KUSSIA. 107 

a Eussian, and he is perfectly content if he thinks he can 
better the condition and make good men and women of his 
progeny. If a chiJd of a' Eussian family, whatever his 
grade socially, should turn out " bad " — should violate 
the law or commit a crime, it becomes a stain upon the 
whole family, a social disgrace which is most keenly felt 
and bitterly deplored. Not to fulfill the promise of child- 
hood, even not to realize the fond wishes of parents for 
the attainment by the child of social respectability and 
moral worth, is an acute disappointment to those parents. 
In fact, the lives of Eussian parents are wrapped up in 
their children, and there is no sacrifice the former will not 
make for the well-being and benefit of the latter. The 
first desideratum sought by the parents is to give the chil- 
dren an education as thorough and complete as the family 
means will permit — an education which includes morality 
and religion as equally essential as book-learning. The 
Eussian people, as a rule, are deeply religious. The in- 
difference, the unbelief, the flippancy about teleological 
subjects that have invaded and so deeply permeated the 
masses of every other civilized nation have as yet found 
no lodgment in the hearts or the minds of the Eussian 
masses. Consequently the Eussian offspring is trained 
from his earliest days in-the paths of morality and relig- 
ion. When the child is sufficiently advanced in years and 
in scholastic acquirements, he is sent to a gymnasium — 
which constitutes an epoch in his life and an occasion of 
felicity to his parents. The crowning moment arrives, 
however, when the child (either male or female, for both 
sexes are admitted to the universities and educated free by 



108 THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 

the Government) is prepared to enter a university and 
there be trained not only in the higher branches of aca- 
demic learning but qualified to transact the duties of an 
honorable profession. That is an hour of joyous anticipa- 
tion to the child — it is an epoch of unalloyed gratification 
to the parents. For that they have labored and struggled 
and hoped for years. For that they have zealously trained 
their offspring, and instilled into the youthful mind all 
the lessons of truth, of honor, of morality that experience 
could suggest and parental fondness inspire. What bright 
and rosy dreams linger on the horizon of those parents' 
skies! In fancy they behold their children, after winning 
all the honors of the uuiversity, come back to them radi- 
ant in the blossoms of honor, of integrity, of culture, of 
which their childhood's promise was but the dawning 
and carefully watched bud. And amid such rosy-tinted 
dreams the parents live on in briUiant anticipations while 
their children pass through the university course. 

Here in the university the representatives of the three 
classes of Eussian society — the masses, the petty nobles,, and 
the grave nobility, meet on terms of equality and fellow- 
ship. The child so tenderly and anxiously watched over 
and cared for, around whom so many fond and darling 
hopes have centered, is now for the first time in his or her 
life cast upon the resources of private judgment and ex- 
posed to all the temptations of the great world. The 
change from the discipline of home to the freedom of the 
university is at first intoxicating. It is no wonder that 
some of these youths lose their heads, and, yielding to 
temptation, are sucked into the greedy maw of the maeJ- 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 109 

strom of ruin that circles with its irresistible currents 
around every congregated center of human activity. It is 
greatly to the honor of humanity that so few comparatively 
fall. Not that the temptation in Russia is specially of the 
vulgar vices — of the sensual type. It veils its forbidding 
countenance behind a fairer and less sordid tissue. It ap- 
peals not so much to the sensual as to the spiritual, 
and drags to damnation while professing to allure to 
Heaven. 

For it must be acknowledged that whatever of Anarch- 
istic or Nihilistic faith that lingers in Russia seeks the 
cloisters of the universities and then in secret endeavors to 
work the forbidden spell which those sorcerers of sin and 
shame and sorrow, the Anarchists of the outside world, 
have prepared for the doing of their instruments in the 
Russian Empire. In the universities of Russia, as well as 
in Germany, the students form into societies, so well known 
in Germany as " burschenshaften " or fellowship societies. 
Each of these societies holds its regular meetings, and dis- 
cusses politics, morals, religion, as well as arts and sci- 
ences. As I have stated elsewhere Russia is not much 
visited by foreigners, and hence the rest of the world to 
Russians is comparatively unknown, so those students look 
upon the world beyond their own frontiers as a new and 
glorious one. This is always the case with ignorance — 
what I may term intelligent ignorance, which magnifies 
the unknown and always invests what we have not with a 
couleur de rose we deny to what we have. Everything in 
Russia is not perfect — that is conceded — so these students 
reason, but in the world beyond the frontier of which we 



110 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

know nothing everything surely must be peerless. So the 
imagination is unchained and flies at will, not merely over 
geographical ranges but adown the vistas of foreign 
thoughts, foreign arts and foreign philosophies. A favor- 
ite author for discussion is Voltaire, that relentless icono- 
clast, whose paradoxes and sophistries are analyzed by these 
advanced students who, growing greater in fancy than hu- 
manity can ever be in reality, finally regard the sage of 
Verney as a pygmy — quite respectable in his day but sadly 
dwarfed in comparison with the thought of the last half of 
the nineteenth century. Naturally they take up the great 
giant of the century, Herbert Spencer, and find that he 
too, though seemingly at first so radical and audacious, is, 
ere they get through with him, very tame and mild. Their 
appetites have grown impatient of insipid draughts and 
crave fiery potations indeed. La Salle, the German So- 
cialist, promises the gratification their imaginative palates 
desire, and they eagerrj%dissect his themes. But a still 
more fiery concoction is needed, and Held, the Berlin An- 
archist, is next in demand as the draught required. This 
brewer of liquid flame, who is really the founder of mod- 
ern Anarchism, is at last what they desire. Human 
nerves, whether corporeal or imaginative, can not quaff any- 
thing stronger than the drink he brews. He maintains 
that " it has always been the law by which freedom has 
been fettered, and against which the people have strug- 
gled; only do away altogether with law, and the tranquil- 
lity of the people follows as a natural consequence. Pure 
Anarchy is our only hope." Hence the students consider 
how to get rid of the law as the first step toward attaining 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. Ill 

that felicity which depends on Anarchy. This is the be- 
ginning of the " Propaganda. " 

These students who have thus become converts to the 
atrocious doctrines quoted above, who are too young and 
too Immature to see the fallacies in which they are hope- 
lessly involved, but who are full of youthful enthusiasm, 
now seek to make converts among the more sensible of 
their fellows — among those whose characters, more evenly 
balanced, have preserved them from falling into the pits 
adown whose slippery sides their less balanced brethren have 
so wofully plunged. Baffled here, they form into secret so- 
cieties, which they dub political, meet surreptitiously in 
clandestine places, and, thoroughly blind to reason, fancy 
that they are called to the mission of regenerating the 
world, beginning with Russia. It is pertinent here to say 
that those students of the universities are not to be. com- 
pared with foreign students of Germanic or Latin nations, 
who form societies in their schools. The bulk of the Rus- 
sian students are of Slavonic blood. They know, in com- 
mon with the rest of their countrymen, but little of the 
outside world. Beyond the frontiers lies a dim and misty 
region over which only the imagination wanders. This is 
not the case with the Germanic or French or Italian 
student. He may commit excesses and act foolishly in 
the heydey of early youth, but as ho matures he grows 
sensible, knowing as he does the outside world, and look- 
ing at it though the spectacles of common sense colored by 
knowledge. He does not permit himself to lose his judg- 
ment or his mental balance through theories however 
beautiful, startling or audacious. The Slav is different. 



112 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

He is at present the child in the grand family of races. 
His fancy is the controlling element of his character — a 
fancy which wanders unchecked by reason or experience in 
the regions of theory. He has a longing, an ever-present 
unsatisfied longing for something better and higher and 
more distant than the real, however bright that may be. 
What exists in Russia he knows — and undervalues because 
he knows it. "What lies beyond is unknown, and, because 
unknown, prized the more highly. That unthinking, un- 
calculating, generous enthusiasm of the Kelt, born of the 
imagination and matured by acute and lofty sensibilities, 
is even more a birthright of the Slav. His onward 
progress as a race has been phenomenally rapid — too rapid 
indeed for the proper cultivation of practical judgment 
and reason as a balance. When, as a student in the uni- 
versities, he enters the fairy ground of learning and beholds 
all the fair flowers of intellectual culture in their wildest 
luxuriance, he is ever for the plucking, he grows bewildered 
and plucks indiscriminately. The deadly nightshade is as 
lovely in his eyes as the peerless rose, and to his inexperi- 
enced judgment just as valuable. Hence he is liable, in 
his student days, in the childhood of his powers, to make 
many grave mistakes, which the impetuous enthusiasm of 
his nature too often converts into engines for his own de- 
struction, and for trouble, not to say disaster, to his coun- 
try and its institutions. 

Of course 1 shall not be understood as speaking of all 
the students or of a majority of them as thus falling a prey 
to the generous impulses of their enthusiastic Slavonian 
blood. 1 refer, of course, to the more mentally unbalanced 



THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 113 

of them — to those who do not discern between the true and 
the false, but who, child-like, accept the ravings of foreign 
visionaries for its true light, and thus the more easy fall 
into the nets spread for them by the designing and vicious 
men who, for their own selfish purposes, seek to gain over 
as many converts as possible from the educated youth of 
Eussia. The fact that these theorists live in foreign coun- 
tries — that they have crossed the " frontiers," and live in 
that fairy -land over the border, is a guarantee to unbridled 
Slavic imagination of the truth of these wild theories. 
Moreover, there is something in the additional fact that 
Eussians, who have escaped from punishment or been de- 
ported from the country for crime, and who pose as "po- 
litical martyrs," are the authors, ofttimes, of these wild 
and impracticable theories. Thus Hertzen, the late editor 
of the Eolokol, and Michael Bakunin, the disciples and 
expounders for Eussia of the bloody doctrines of the brutal 
Berlin Anarchist, Held, and of the blatant atheist, Stirner, 
enjoy, among these students, a degree of authority and 
esteem that a hundredfold their natural powers would not 
have given them had they stayed in Eussia. 

Teutonic and Latin students naturally fancy themselves 
philosophers, and the first subject to engage their attention 
is that of religion — especially religion in its relations to 
politics — in a word, of Church and State. The French 
student takes the Bevolution of 1791, and glorifies its religion 
— that of Humanism. He disbelieves everything but his 
own nature; that Humanity in the abstract is capable of 
all that was orthodoxically ascribed to Divinity, if only 
Humanity is allowed its freest and fullest development. 



114 THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 

Voltaire is at once the Evangel and the High Priest of this 
religion. The German again is divided into many sects — 
some are earnest advocates of Anarchy, others of pure 
Atheism, while not a few lay their votive offering on the 
altars of Pantheism. The Russian student, a genuine 
eclectic, absorbs all those theories, but from choice treads 
most earnestly in the footsteps of Michael Bakunin, who 
preaches the gospel of Atheism and of Anarchy, bald and 
simple; who is so far advanced in the terrific science of 
destructiveness that he rejects the extreme creed of Hu- 
manism as savoring too much of priestcraft and superstition. 
Maintaining that man should not submit to any external 
rule, but that there are no rights whatever, except what 
man assigns to himself, the Eussian student adopts his 
blasphemous and incredible definition, " Homo sidi deus," 
as the essence of pure truth and reason, as the sole guide 
of human conduct, as the one standard to which all man- 
kind shall conform. It is useless to inform the American 
reader that such teachings are but a sorry preparation for 
what the Nihilist so loudly calls for in Eussia, a Constitu- 
tional Government. For what must be the nature of that 
Constitutional Government whose fundamental principle is 
the denial of all government, constitutional or otherwise, 
and which regards the supremacy of pure Anarchy as the 
highest possible stage in the development of human nature? 
All this, 1 was careful to state some papers back, was the 
condition of what is called by banished or escaped Eussian 
criminals the " Propaganda. " It is, except in obscure in- 
stances, a condition of the past. It was in Eussia, in one 
sense, a manifestation of the same diseased intellectual 



THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 115 

aspiration and activity that, under the guise of philosophy, 
introduced its poison into every nation of Europe; which 
gave birth in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Spain, in 
England, and even to some extent in this country, to 
theories as false as they were impracticable, as wild as they 
were vicious, but which, ere they were controlled and 
squelched, plunged Europe in many a scene of bloodshed 
and disorder. The Government of Eussia learned a lesson 
from the experience of other nations, and nipped the 
bloody flower in its bud — not, however, without under- 
going some severe experiences. 

These Eussian students, as I have stated, once imbued 
with the doctrines of Held and Bakunin, become an easy 
prey to the Solons and Catos of Eevolution, as they are 
called by their disciples. These Solons are lawyers with- 
out practice, traders without 'business, ruined gamblers, 
degraded military officers, civil officials who have been dis- 
missed for crime, disappointed place-hunters, and the 
whole disreputable swarm of vicious idlers that infest all 
large cities. Their idea of liberty is that of liberty for 
themselves to pillage with impunity, and riot and revolu- 
tion with them is only another name for rapine and the 
gratification, of revenge. Their utter incapacity for ra- 
tional freedom, the utter perfidy of their intentions, and 
the selfish villainy of their objects, have been time and 
again manifested in Europe, and has been shown in this 
country where their infamous doctrines have penetrated. 
These men ' invite the students above named to join their 
associations, inflame their minds with additional mysteries 
(such as are involved in the ceremonies of initiation), excite 



116 The new era in Russia. 

them with stories of political martyrs, and the glory of 
their own doctrines. Naturally their first step toward do- 
ing away with all law (that is to say/ the propagation of 
their doctrines) is to exterminate the police, who are the 
guardians and conservators of law. To this end the 
Anarchical conspirators and Propagandists begin by turn- 
ing the minds of the inflamed and fanatic students to 
deeds of violence against the police. Here comes in the 
work of the so-called " Central Council/' which is com- 
posed of the disreputable class of men described as " Solons 
and Catos of the Revolution. " They meet clandestinely 
in cellars or other obscure places. Their mistresses gen- 
erally preside as hostesses — tea, cigarettes and vodka are 
supplied plentifully. Each meeting is carried on with 
great solemnity, so as to impress the youthful minds of the 
students who are there. Once initiated into this society, 
the youthful student thinks no more of the tender care 
which his parents exercised over him. He casts forever 
behind him all respect for the home that nurtured him — 
of the parents that loved him and dwelt so fondly upon 
his future career of usefulness. He neglects his studies. 
He loses the cheerful gayety of his early days, and becomes 
sullen, morose and ill-tempered. He pays no more re- 
spect to his father, and contemns the caressing affection of 
his mother. His thoughts and aspirations are all bound 
up in the bloody sorceress of the "Propaganda." His 
soul becomes stained with sensual sins, to which he is 
tempted by the conspirators, who feel that they must de- 
stroy his innocence before he is fit to become their tool. 
It is always dinned into his ears that none are fit to be 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 117 

members of the society who are not willing to give up 
father and mother, and even tenderer ties, in order to bet- 
ter serve the cause of Nihilism. He is persuaded that his 
heart must beat in pity and in sympathy only for his 
suffering comrades beyond the frontiers, driven there by a 
brutal and bloody police. From the objects of individual 
affection about him he is taught to turn away, and con- 
centrate all his affections upon objects beyond his ken. 
He is assured that beyond these frontiers there are many 
thousands, ay, millions of men who cherish the same aspi- 
rations as himself, whose united efforts would speedily pro- 
duce the ideal state he longs for, but who are prevented 
from acting in concert because of the interference of law. 
Upon him, he is told, rests the duty of abolishing law. 
His first step in this direction is to kill the conservators of 
that law — the police. With a hideous travesty of the 
Saviour's language, they tell him no one is worthy of that 
ideal liberty unless he leaves father and mother and all 
tenderer ties, and takes up the burden of consecration of 
all his powers and thoughts to the service of Nihilism. 

Under such teachings, enforced with subtlety and gar- 
nished with sensual allurements, the weak-minded visionary 
becomes a moody and restless fanatic, having no object in 
life but to put in execution the diabolical doctrines he has 
been taught. And thus inflamed, maddened, dehuman- 
ized, he becomes indeed a fitting tool for the performance 
of the ineffable wickedness of the vile wretches composing 
the Central Council. 

It is pertinent here to make a few explanatory remarks 
about this so-called " Central Committee." It has no local 



118 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

habitation in Russia. It operates altogether from without 
the borders of the Empire. Formerly its headquarters 
were in Switzerland — now they are in London with branches 
in New York. It is composed, as I have said before, of 
disgraced army officers, dismissed civil officials from the 
Russian service, ruined gamblers, and briefless lawyers. 
They took into their service the escaped or deported Rus- 
sian criminals whom they herald to the world as " politi- 
cals." Some of this latter class, students who have run 
away from Russia, are honest " cranks/' fanatical vis- 
ionaries warped to mental madness, but, nevertheless, as 
far as their defective judgment goes, honest believers 
that they are working in the interest of humanity. 
These fanatical, persons are the ones selected by the 
" Central Committee " to go back to Russia for purposes 
of assassination. The Central Committee originally con- 
sisted of Poles, but the latter have been replaced by Rus- 
sians. Their chief way of procuring funds to live on and 
to carry on the bloody work is the same that has been prac- 
ticed by them in England since 1836, and is now being 
practiced in this country. They publish soul-harrowing 
accounts of Russian despotism, cite instances (always man- 
ufactured) of incredible cruelty to individuals, and solicit 
money for the purpose of warring against this barbarous 
despotism and to rescue the people from the miseries of so 
terrible and brutal a tyranny. Every Russian who moves 
away from his country to avoid the penalty of his crimes, 
and every one who is banished by the Government from 
that land for similar reasons, is enabled, by the ramifica- 
tions of this Central Committee throughout Europe, to get 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 119 

into communication with the headquarters at London — in 
many cases to personally reach London. Each one is im- 
mediately announced as a victim of a bloodthirsty despot- 
ism, escaping from untold horrors because of his opinions 
in or efforts for the establishment of a " Constitutional 
Government." The English and American people hold 
the phrase, a " Constitutional Government," in great 
veneration. Liberty-loving people, they revere a " Consti- 
tution " as the palladium of that liberty. Their sympa- 
thies are always on the side of an oppressed people strug- 
gling for freedom. Ignorant of the true state of affairs in 
Russia, but deluded by the falsehoods of the vile intri- 
guants who compose the Central Committee, and keenly 
alive to the calls of suffering humanity, the English and 
American people respond generously to these appeals, and 
are cozened out of their means without stint by the false 
pretenses of the sharp and unscrupulous rogues, who there- 
by fatten in luxury and idleness on the credulity of their 
dupes. Their methods of procedure are not new. They 
were begun by Polish refugees in London in 1836, and for 
the same purpose. These men wanted money to live on 
in luxury and ease. They disdained to do honest work for 
a livelihood. That was beneath the dignity of a Polish noble, 
refugee or not. Work was for serfs, for the common peo- 
ple. His business was altogether different. He had lived 
in debauchery and crime on the proceeds of his serfs' labor 
until Russian justice and Russian humanity had stepped 
in to prevent his further robbery of his serfs. His old 
resources gone he must have new ones. He therefore or- 
ganized an endless war of assassination and pillage against 



120 THE NEW EEA IK EUSSIA. 

individual Russians. He established organized murder. 
He put into operation the fiends of systematic pillage and 
arson. His great weapons were falsehood and hypocrisy, 
and with these he wrung money without stint from the will- 
ing purses of a simple-hearted, credulous people, too hon- 
est themselves to suspect others of so monstrous a crime as 
this organized false pretense on the philanthropy of man- 
kind. The Poles pursued this plan for years. At last 
their Russian congeners, sharper, shrewder, more energetic 
and unscrupulous than the Poles, took possession of this 
engine of murder and fraud, ousted the Poles, and ran the 
machine for themselves. Stories of outrages against Pol- 
ish patriots were now seldom told. In their place were 
moving recitals of horrible infamies against Russian patri- 
ots. The people of Russia were represented as a terrorized 
community, living in a state of trembling fear, unable to 
shake off the bloody despotism that was destroying them. 
Only a few had the courage to defy the tyrant. This they 
did not for themselves merely, but because they were 
moved to uncontrollable frenzy in pity for their suffering 
countrymen. So they plunged upon the tyrant. They 
waged a " war of independence." Occasionally they 
would kill a man, outrage a woman, pick a pocket, com- 
mit a burglary, burn a house, and then fly at once to a 
foreign land, howling boastfully of what they had done for 
the cause of liberty. Henceforth they were Russian " patri- 
ots," exiled from their native land to a foreign shore, but 
from that shore plotting and planning how to send agents 
to Russia, there to kill some other man, outrage some 
other woman, pick some oth^r pocket, burn some other 



THE NEW EKA IN EUSSIA. 121 

house or commit some other burglary. Money flowed iuto 
their coffers freely. They lived at ease, their hardest work 
being the denunciation of the bloody despot who had en- 
acted laws to punish murderers, ravishers, thieves, burg- 
lars and incendiaries. The gullible English people, honest, 
religious, and law abiding, willingly contributed of their 
means not only to enable those men to live in luxury and 
sensuality but to keep up the murder and pillage of the 
foreign people, and to spread the doctrines of an Atheism 
which not only ^rejected God but spat upon and denounced 
morality. At times there would come a diminution in the 
stream of shekels flowing into the coffers of the " Central 
Committee." Then the " outrage mill," would be taken 
out and furbished up, and some more than usually horrible 
story of cruelty be given to the press for dissemination. 
The shekels would then flow more freely. Finally, these 
men, all of them Atheists, all of them blasphemers of Di- 
vinity, scoffers at morality, living each one in a shameless 
sensuality that defied alike the law of the land and the dic- 
tum of public opinion, these Atheists and debauchees, I 
say, for the purpose of increasing their revenues, made an 
indignant attack upon the Eussian Government for its 
persecution of religion. Hence the origin of the " Outrages 
on the Jews. " And the singular spectacle was presented 
of blatant Atheists and irredeemable debauchees seeking 
to inflame a Christian people to indignation against a for- 
eign and friendly race for alleged interference with the 
worship of God and the practice of morality. 

This is the " Central Committee," men who live by or- 
ganized murder, which they commit vicariously, who are 



122 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

supported in this course of systematic assassination by the 
money and sympathy of honest, God-fearing, law-abiding, 
moral peoples. 

The Central Committee does not, in the person of any 
of its members, venture back to Kussia. * It however keeps 
agents there, whose business it is to seduce the class of 
students 1 have described previously into the doctrines of 
Anarchy. These agents, moreover, incite to assassination 
and to riot, although they are particular not to appear in 
such matters themselves. The deluded students, both 
male and female, are the instruments they employ in act- 
ual overt crime. These agents, acting by the authority 
of the " Central Committee," send particular ones among 
these students into the factories as operatives, represent- 
ing to them that they have been selected for such a high 
and responsible duty because of the great esteem in which 
the Central Committee holds them. Even a " crank " is 
susceptible to flattery. The students, chiefly females, in 
this case, seek work in the factories as operatives. Once 
engaged there they take every opportunity to promulgate 
their doctrines and make converts among those operatives. 

These operatives, as a well-nigh universal rule, reject 
such doctrines. They are loyal to the Government and 
devoted to the Emperor. Like the emancipated serf, it is 
their Government and he is their Emperor. The agents of 
the "Central Committee," as well as that society itself, 
well know these facts. They do not expect to make con- 
verts among factory operatives. But here and there some 
weak-minded or viciously inclined man or woman looks 
with favor on these doctrines of pillage and Anarchy as 



THE NEW EKA IN RUSSIA 123 

affording a more favorable opportunity of gratifying their 
evil and criminal propensities. The factories, however, 
are made the theater of such " propaganding " efforts be- 
cause they afford to the " Committee " about the only actual 
instances of " students " being arrested by the Govern- 
ment and punished for crimes committed. For example: 
one of these student " cranks/' in his efforts to spread his 
doctrines, will encounter opposition and hostility, which, 
judiciously inflamed, may break out into a riot or an affray. 
Then the attention of the police is called to the scene, to 
preserve order and repress lawlessness. The student who 
is the author of the disturbance and is generally devoid of 
practical common sense and prudence, as nearly all such 
" cranks " are, is almost invariably the scapegoat. He 
is frequently maltreated by the operatives, and generally 
falls into the hands of the police. Then the instance, 
highly colored to suit the purposes of the " Propaganda," 
is communicated to that body by the wily agent, and is 
published to the Western World as another example of Rus- 
sian cruelty in putting down an attempt of the people to 
protest against the despotism which crushes them! 

It is a fact that the Russian " peasant " is bitterly op- 
posed to the promulgation of Anarchical doctrines, or any 
other doctrine, in short, which does not coincide with his 
present religious belief and political customs. He is, more- 
over, fanatically devoted to the Emperor on account of 
Emancipation. So the " Propogauda " finds no allies 
among them. When the peasants detect the presence of 
such a " propagandist " among them they generally break 
his head with their sticks, and then turn him over to the 



124 THE NEW EKA IN RUSSIA. 

police. The " peasantry/' who compose much more than 
nine-tenths of the entire Russian people, are perfectly satis- 
fied with the Government, " Autocracy," " Police," " Ad- 
ministrative Process," " Despotism," " Siberian Exile Sys- 
tem," and all the other appurtenances of the Russian 
"tyranny." All these things are popular among them. 
The Nihilistic leaders confess they can do nothing with 
the " peasantry." Hence it may be safely announced that 
the people of Russia are opposed to any change in their 
Government, that they don't sympathize with the Russian 
"patriots" of the "Central Committee." Who then 
form the constituency of these Russian " patriots of the 
Central Committee?" 

If the people of Russia are satisfied with the terrible des- 
potism that is grinding them to the earth, and reject every 
effort to change it, how can a half hundred persons outside 
the Russian Empire justify their efforts to overturn and 
change such a Government, even if their motives were as 
pure and their actions as commendable as those of the 
American people who threw off the yoke of Great Britain 
in 1776? 

If more than nine-tenths of a people are satisfied with 
their Government, and oppose every attempt to change it, 
as in the case with the Russian people (in even a much 
larger proportion), how can the remaining less than one- 
tenth be justified by the moral sense of the world in seek- 
ing to plunge their country into all the horrors of a re- 
bellion? This fact alone proves that the " patriots " of 
Russia are confined to the moral outlaws, who, from a 
place of security outside that country, plot murder and 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 125 

arson and pillage to be committed on the people within 
the borders of that land. 

The " Propaganda " then does not exist in Russia as an 
organized institution. It is a motion from without, con- 
trolled and directed by outlaws for the basest of purposes, 
assisted by other parties who lend them assistance from self- 
ish motives alone. There is no dissatisfaction inside Eussia 
with the Government or the institutions or the laws of 
the land. As Hudibras puts it: 

" No thief e'er felt the halter draw 
With good opinion of the law," 

so no Russian criminal suffering the penalty of his crimes 
or skulking from just punishment in a foreign land speaks 
commendatorily of the law he has violated or of the Gov- 
ernment whose strong hand inflicts punishment on him for 
his crimes. But Russia has not yet reached that condition 
where the people are willing to give up the reign of law 
and order for a government of criminals who confessedly 
advocate the abrogation of all law, ordecf and security 
as the end they seek to attain. The Russian " Propa- 
ganda/' therefore, is an association of criminals in foreign 
lands who advocate murder and lawlessness for Russia. 
They are successful in making converts in Russia 
through their paid agents only among the defective and 
delinquent classes, among weak-minded students and ir- 
reclaimable law-breakers. They can only exist, even in 
their present state, by gulling the people among whom 
they live of money enough to pay the expenses of their 
sensual living and their murderous conspiracies. 



126 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

Assuredly this gullibility can not and will not continue 
much longer. It only requires a knowledge of the true 
character and purposes of the Nihilistic leaders for the 
English and American peoples to rise up in the majesty of 
their outraged humanity and spew forever out of their 
midst these vile blood-suckers who have so long preyed on 
the holiest f motions of mankind. 

The criminal classes of every country are a source of 
very anxious thought to the Government of that country, 
and under the most favorable circumstances present many 
grave difficulties in the way of restraining and keeping 
them in check. Eussia is not exempt from these difficul- 
ties. Besides, she is exposed to dangers from the criminal 
classes such as other countries are exempt from. The ex- 
citable character of the Slav, who composes the bulk of 
her populace, the many distinct races that make up the 
population of the Empire, the comparative sparseness of 
her population to the square mile, the immense area over 
which her people are spread, and the plottings of foreign 
criminals to excite lawlessness — all add to the difficulty 
which Eussia meets in controlling and keeping under her 
criminal classes. 

The Eussian criminal, moreover, has all the vigorous 
vices characteristic of a young and developing people. He 
is more vigorous, and therefore more dangerous and 
harder to handle than his German, or French, or Italian, 
or English prototype. The murderer is a murderer the 
world over, of course, and the Eussian murderer is not 
more brutal or cruel than the Spanish, or Portuguese, or 
Sicilian cut-throat. But as the latter belongs to a race 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 127 

which has long since passed its period of youth, which has 
lost its pristine vigor, so hence is he to be dreaded less 
than his Russian congener, who belongs to a race yet in the 
youth of its growth, and consequently possesses in crime, 
as an individual, a vigor, a boldness, an impetuosity which 
belong to the race as a race. Extreme vigilance in detect- 
ing and inevitable certainty in punishing crime are there- 
fore necessary on the part of the Russian authorities in 
their dealings with law-breakers. Withal, there is less 
cruelty in Russian jurisprudence than in that of any other 
nation. Their punishments are less severe than are given 
in England, France, Germany, or this country. And 
this, too, when there is a species of crime and a class of 
criminals which in any other country would meet with 
death and torture. As an example of this, and also as 
an illustration of the wretchedness and misery wrought in 
Russia by the cold-blooded, merciless, murderous efforts 
of the " Central Committee " of Nihilism to propagate its 
villainous doctrines, 1 narrate the following story: 

In one of the cities of Southern Russia lived a music- 
teacher, a man of high character and social respectability, 
who had an estimable family consisting of wife and three 
children, the eldest a boy, and the youngest two girls. It 
was a family of refinement, courtesy, and particularly of 
warm affection each member for the other. While the chil- 
dren were all young the father died. The mother, a lady of 
energy and strong will, but gentle, refined, and devoted to 
her family, took up her late husband's business and there- 
by was enabled, though at the cost of arduous labor and a 
continuous patient self-sacrifice, to keep her little family 



128 THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 

together and give her children a good education. The boy 
was her hope and her pride, and in character and in 
brightness he justified those hopes. The lessons of mor- 
ality, of religion, of honor so sedulously taught by the 
mother took favorable root in his heart. He was studi- 
ous, industrious, cautious, and warmly affectionate to his 
mother and sisters. He seemed to realize the sacrifices his 
mother made for him, and strove in every way to brighten 
and soften the asperities of her lot. His intellectual per- 
ceptions were keen, his industry remarkable, and at an 
early age he was prepared for the university, where a more 
than usually brilliant career was predicted for him. All 
fond parents can sympathize with the joy and the pride 
this devoted mother felt in her obedient, studious, brilliant 
boy, when he had attained that prize so ardently sought 
for by Russian youth — matriculation in the university. 
At the university he for awhile justified the bright expec- 
tations entertained of him. He soon took high rank as a 
student. He was foremost in his classes and manifested a 
thirst for learning which, no less than his amiable behavior 
aud correct morals, made him a favorite with the faculty. 
His attentions to his mother and sisters were of the most 
dutiful and affectionate kind. To relieve the mother of 
the burden of supporting the family, the son, in the inter- 
vals of study, gave lessons in scholastic studies, acquiring 
a number of pupils and thus earning a respectable income. 
He enjoyed the favor of the community, by whom he was 
regarded not only as a highly intellectual but a thoroughly 
moral and worthy young man. Before him, therefore, 
life held out a glowing prospect, and in its contemplation 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 129 

the mother experienced the highest and tenderest mater- 
nal gratification. 

With all this high character/ however, with unques- 
tionable acuteness of intellect and ardor in study, he had 
serious defects of character that as yet had not become 
known, as no occasion for exhibiting them had as yet oc- 
curred. They were known to the patient and vigilant eye 
of the mother, however, to whom the knowledge frequent- 
ly brought a dread of what the future might reveal when 
her boy had gone into the world and become thereby ex- 
posed to all the temptations so abounding there. He was 
imaginative, even visionary. His judgment was unbal- 
anced. He was impetuous, enthusiastic, even rash. 
Guileless himself, he was too prone to look upon men and 
things without suspicion. He was weak in will power, 
and instinctively sheltered himself under the protective 
aegis of a stronger and more robust individuality. The 
knowledge o£ this, I say, was the serpent's trail that at 
times wilted the Eden flowers in the mother's life. She 
hoped for the best; she exulted in the successes of her son, 
she built brave dreams of his after-life, she committed him 
with fervid and earnest prayer to the watchful and loving 
care of God; but at times the quiet serenity of her hopes 
was ruffled by the intruding fear of possible dangers aris- 
ing from this infirmity of her son's character. Yet for a 
long while after he entered the university there was no 
change in her son's demeanor or his actions, except, per- 
haps, he grew more and more ardent in his labors to fit 
himself for the battle of life. At length, however, the 
watchful eye of the mother detected a change. He grew 

5 



130 THE NEW EBA IN RUSSIA. 

moody, silent and constrained. By degrees the innocent 
and cheerful gayety of his nature gave way to fitful irrita- 
bility and to sullenness. He seemed to brood in gloom 
and sternness over some hidden project — some concealed 
resolve, and thus cast a shadow over the home which his 
presence, until lately, had made radiant with light and 
joy. The anxious mother watched these symptoms with a 
sinking heart. They were not indications of ill-health, 
for physically he was thoroughly well. There was no 
youthful passion for some girl which, in its doubts and 
hopes and fears, cast over his young heart the gloom and 
the pain which youthful lovers so oft delight to torture 
themselves with needlessly, foolishly, but characterstic- 
ally. It was not love that had made him moody, nor was 
it sickness. She questioned him, but he gave no answer. 
The occasional discourtesy, even rudeness, of his manner 
to her and his sisters — until lately so full of affectionate 
deference and attachment — spoke louder than words of the 
change going on within him. Suddenly, at length, he cut 
off the sources of the family income by refusing to give 
lessons any longer. He would take no more pupils. This 
strange, this heartless conduct, increased the mother's 
fears and redoubled her vigilance; but neither fear nor 
vigilance, though both inspired by a mother's love, could 
allay his moodiness or discover its cause. By and by he 
began to stay out late at nights, then to be absent from 
home at times, when formerly he always sought to be with 
mother and sisters. Once he was away for several days. 
The mother could not restrain herself longer. She went 
to the university and inquired about her boy. The answer 



TIfE NEW ERA IN EUSSIA. 131 

given these inquiries was that he was still a favorite — not 
quite so studious as formerly, but giving no trouble to the 
faculty, and reporting for duty punctually, his occasional 
absences for several days at a time exciting no comment 
and provoking no inquiry. But it was this last informa- 
tion that made the mother's heart sore indeed. Where 
was her boy during those periods of absence from the uni- 
versity? He had not spoken to her of them; rather, by 
his manner, seemed willing to tacitly deceive her into the 
belief he was every day at his studies. When she again 
saw him she earnestly besought him to tell her the cause 
of his changed manner, and to confide in her as his best 
and dearest friend. He seemed moved at this, but went 
away, simply saying he might confide in her some future 
time. 

He had right to be moved, for the infirmity of his char- 
acter had led him to a fatal mistake, which, with char- 
acteristic infirmity, he was now regretting. Some time 
after he entered the university the brilliance of Jiis intel- 
lect attracted the attention of a fellow-student, who had 
long since become a Nihilist, and the latter sought his ac- 
quaintance. Acquaintance soon developed the peculiari- 
ties of his character — just the kind, when the mind was 
thoroughly inflamed, to become an ardent and a submis- 
sive tool to the subtle and mercenary spirits guiding the 
"Propaganda." To make this boy a convert was now 
undertaken. Cautiously, yet rapidly, his student friend 
supplied him with poisonous literature, discussed with him 
the vile and wicked doctrines therein contained, subtly an- 
swered his objections, and, by appealing to the visionary 



132 THE NEW EEA IN RUSSIA. 

spirit within him, soon overthrew the safeguards which 
home training and example had instilled in him. He was 
not a sensual boy, and the temptations to his fall were 
therefore divested of all gross features— until the right 
time. When it was thought' his weak judgment and his 
daring imagination had become sufficiently warped and 
stimulated, after many poetical discussions on the rights 
of humanity and the glorious destiny of those who become 
martyrs for the sake of the truth, he was persuaded by this 
aforementioned friend, one evening after leaving a stu- 
dents' club, to make a call on some lady friends of the 
latter. He finally consented to go. He was introduced to 
several pretty, vivacious, bright young girls, who found 
little difficulty in inducing the young student to accom- 
pany them to a gathering where they said further discus- 
sion of the doctrines that had warped him would be had. 
That this gathering was held in an obscure and ill-con- 
ditioned place did not excite his attention, nor the incon- 
gruity of educated and respectable ladies surreptitiously 
seeking entrance into an edifice whose surroundings were 
altogether disreputable. Once in, the student was intro- 
duced to many men and women, all of whom sought cor- 
dially and flatteringly to make him welcome and pleased 
with his surroundings. The room where he sat was fur- 
nished with a degree of luxuriance strongly in contrast with 
the sordid surroundings outside. The women were young, 
pretty, bright, vivacious, and affectionately courteous. 
The men were intelligent, genial, and full of Ion cam- 
eraderie. There were tables here and there on which 
boxes of cigars, cigarettes, bottles of brandy or of vodka, 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 133 

and steaming samovars of fragrant tea were placed. The 
girls acted as hosts, pouring out the tea with smiles and 
bright sallies of wit worthy a Paris salon in the era of 
Madame Sevigne. All was courteous, genial, cordial, pol- 
ished at least, if not refined. The conversation was of hu- 
manity, of the glorious times yet to be, of the reign of 
liberty for all, and of the downfall of despots. Gradually, 
as the brandy passed more frequently, the talk became 
more earnest and more pointed. That rosy-tinted Fairy- 
land beyond the borders of Eussia, where dwelt. the exiled 
patriots, where men preaohed and lived a doctrine of free- 
dom, equality, and good-fellowship grew to be the main 
topic of talk — that and the means whereby the borders 
could be obliterated and Eussia become the home of free- 
dom and advanced humanity. And then, when all the in- 
flammable imaginations had been wrought up to ecstasy, 
some one proposed the holding of a council of the Brother- 
hood — a meeting of a Nihilistic circle. There was but one 
objection — our young student was not a Nihilist. 

" A trifling objection,'' said a pretty girl, who had de- 
voted herself specially to the boy; " he will become one. 
Let us initiate him." 

His consent, in that condition, was ar matter of course. 
Little time was spent in preliminaries: The room soon 
took on the appearance of a mediasval hall, with all the 
appliances for a ceremony of solemn and impressive grand- 
eur. And thdn, amid such associations, in a moment of 
spirited intoxication, really unaware of what he was doing, 
and too frenzied to care even if he knew, the boy, amid 
grotesque and bizarre mummeries that impressed the event 



134 THE NEW EEA IN EUSSIA. 

the more forcibly on his mind, was inducted into the mys- 
teries of initiation as a Nihilist — became a member of the 
Brotherhood having for its object the realization of those 
impossible, those diseased dreams which the boy cherished, 
and which he aod his confreres dignified with the name of 
philosophical ideas. At this initiation there is nothing 
but beautiful and impressive solemnity followed by a 
time of hearty good-fellowship. All sordid, practical, or 
prosaic details are for other occasions. 

After the ceremony the youthful neophyte was over- 
whelmed with congratulations, loaded with delicate flat- 
tery, plied with brandy until all thought of the morrow 
had fled, and he was fairly upon the road of a sensuality 
that, had it not come so insidiously, would have disgusted 
and deterred him. The black eyes and the scarlet lips and 
the caressing bosom of the beautiful girl who had suggest- 
ed his initiation completed his fall, and ere the morning 
sun arose he had taken in rapid succession the steps which 
made him an outlaw, a terrorist to his country, a traitor, 
and a debauche! Patriotism, integrity and innocence 
were all engulfed at the same time in the same ominous 
vortex. Yet, as his instincts were naturally pure, even 
the ecstasy into which the conclave tried to keep him by 
sophistical reasoning, by sensual indulgences, could not 
wholly banish his memory of the past nor subdue his re- 
grets for the peace and the innocence he had forever for- 
feited. In the pure atmosphere of home the gentle 
counsels of his mother, the affectionate caresses and con- 
versation of his sisters made him feel so bitterly his own 
degradation that his wonted gayety became moroseness, 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 135 

and the serene temper he had always shown gave way to 
irritability. With a knowledge of his dreadful oath, and 
of the sensual sins into which he was now steeped to the 
very lips, he could not bear to look upon the innocent 
faces of his pure young sisters or greet his mother's ma- 
tronly consideration with his old time gratitude and affec- 
tion. He had, indeed, eaten of the forbidden fruit and 
been banished from Eden, at whose gates he might indeed 
linger longingly, but whose portals the flaming swords of 
the cherubim repressed all hope of repassing. Still the 
weakness of his character kept him in the same paths with 
as much power as a resolute will would have exercised. 
He bitterly regretted his folly one moment, the next he 
sought to inflame his mind with the pernicious sophistries 
of his teachers. This time he would sigh for his forfeited 
innocence with tears in his eyes, and his heart as well ; the 
next he would forget all but a dream of the sensual in the 
arms of the Circe who had completed his ruin. The 
" Propaganda " was not ready yet to use him, and it was 
thought wise to keep around him the network of allure- 
ments that had originally gained him. Hence the Delilah, 
whom he fancied his in heart as well as lips, still displayed 
her charms, still wove her spells, waiting for the hour 
when her shorn lover should be sent out to grapple with 
the Philistines of law and order — either to perish in the at- 
tempt, or, if successful, to become a wanderer or vagabond 
on the face of the earth; in either case she would be 
permitted to weave her spells around some other boy, and 
thus gratify her love for vanity at the same time render 
service to the " Central Committee," who owned her boclv 



136 THE NEW EEA IN RUSSIA. 

and soul. For these Nihilist women are true and faithful 
in but one particular. Their belief is a rejection of God, 
law, morality, truth, marriage, or faith — and they are al- 
ways faithful to that faith though false to the core in 
everything else. 

On the night when our young student broke from his 
mother's detaining entreaties, with the half promise that 
he might at some future time tell her what she begged him 
to confide in her, he went to the obscure den where his 
fellow-conspirators were wont to assemble. It was now 
nightfall. There was a larger attendance than usual. 
There was a murmur in the air as if the bud of some 
tremendous secret was audibly swelling into the bursting 
blossom of revelation. There was brandy and vodka and 
tea as usual, but the steaming urns of the latter were 
seldom turned while the flasks and bottles of the former 
were of tener clinked than usual. There was a restlessness 
of those present that could not fail to strike his attention. 
Even the caresses of his mistress had a hurried tinge in 
their touch. "Wrought up as he was, however, by the 
struggle within, he noticed but did not weigh these unusual 
accessions to the fateful drama he was playing. Mean- 
while the fiery liquor passed, the gathering resolved itself 
into a regular meeting of the Council, the blasphemous 
doctrines of universal Anarchy and destruction were 
preached with usual vigor but with unusual restlessness, 
till at last the overwrought attention seemed appeased by 
a knock at the door, loud, impatient, imperative. A mo- 
ment's consultation and the Council was informed that a 
special communication from the Central Committee had 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 137 

reached them. "The Chief of the Council was summoned, 
and during the few moments he was absent the Council gave 
itself up to hilarious excitement. It was evidently, said 
they, the commission to some noble and glorious duty — the 
mission of striking a grand blow for liberty and humanity 
by ridding Kussia of some tyrant — the performance of 
some great and desired deed. Women vied with men in 
wishing that the choice might fall on them. To our 
student, the only silent one of that group, said his mis- 
tress, while the red of her lips grew more scarlet and her 
eyes flashed with a lambent flame: 

" Oh, how I wish I may be the favored one to execute 
the will of the Central [Committee! How gloriously will 
my memory be cherished by the friends of liberty then — 
for if they entrust the duty to me 1 swear it shall be suc- 
cessfully done! But if 1 am not so favored, how I hope 
the choice will fall on you, my love! How proud I shall 
be of you to think that the Central Committee has so highly 
honored you as to entrust such a commission to you! And 
how your name will be echoed all over the world as the 
champion of freedom and humanity who dared to slrike 
down the tyrant even in his very halls! I shall be proud 
of you! I 7wpe it will be you or 1!" 

Then the Chief came back, and addressed the Council. 
He spoke glowingly of the high honor in which the Cen- 
tral Committee held that fortunate member of their Coun- 
cil who had been entrusted with the sacred duty of execut- 
ing its will. 

" Not to every member of our Council, comrades," said 
the Chief with Oriental fervor, " is delegated so lofty a 



138 THE NEW EEA IN EUSSIA. 

• 

mission. He must have been tried and proved worthy of 
the trust so reposed in him. Greater glory can not fall to 
man than the delegation of this sacred trust to our fortu- 
nate and happy comrade who has thus been greatly digni- 
fied by the Central Committee. Would that the honor 
had fallen on me! But that it is the glorious privilege of 
our youngest comrade to do the will the Central Commit- 
tee stifles all selfish regrets at my own disappointment in 
the knowledge that he who has won the honor is so super- 
latively worthy of it! Comrade, I congratulate you! 
Humanity will never permit your memory to be tarnished 
in its gratitude, or the remembrance of your heroic deeds 
to be dimmed !" 

All this and much more was spoken by the chief to our 
young student, while the members of the Council, pressing 
around him, tendered the warmest, the most enthusiastic 
congratulations. Men shook his hand and hugged him 
fervently. Women kissed and caressed him, and mingled 
tears of joy with their smiles of congratulation. The 
brandy was plied well. The moody student was aroused 
into his whilom enthusiasm. The baneful doctrines he 
had imbibed came back in full force to invigorate him. 
It was with something of the wild delight of his fellow-con- 
spirators that he received his instructions. These, accom- 
panied with a loaded revolver and a vial of poison, were to 
repair at a certain hour the next day to a certain locality, 
and there wait for the passing by of a noted police official, 
whom he was to suddenly shoot with the revolver furnished 
him. In the. confusion incident upon the shooting he was 
to escape. Failing to do so he was, when apprehension 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 139 

was inevitable, to swallow the contents of the poison vial, 
thus showing the despots that the disciples of liberty knew 
how to die for humanity, and how they scorned to derision 
the minions and the tortures of the tyrant! 

Fairly intoxicated with the unhallowed excitement, the 
young student accepted the murderous trust, yet with feel- 
ings of mingled exultation and depression. He was told 
to report the result of his efforts at the next meeting, 
unless he should be apprehended in the act, when by self- 
immolation he was assured of a martyr's crown in the 
archives of the order and a glorious immortality in the 
grateful hearts of his comrades. But with morning came 
reflection — and repentance. The cold-blooded horror of 
the proposed assassination X sucn ^ seemed to him now) 
filled him with unutterable loathing for the associations 
that had ruined him. He personally knew the inspector 
of police he had been detailed to assassinate — knew him to 
be an upright, conscientious, honest man, striving his ut- 
most to serve his God and country. Thinking of the 
amiable character of his proposed victim, the boy indig- 
nantly resolved to abandon his wicked associations, and to 
regain if possible the peace and the cheerfulness to which 
he had been a stranger ever since that fatal hour when he 
had linked his fortunes with the Nihilists. 

" Why should I slaughter, in cold blood, this man whom 
I know to be a good man, an honest, upright, patriotic 
citizen, one who loves his country and his fellow-man, and 
who has taken a deep, active, though unostentatious interest 
in the welfare of his fellows, striving to relieve distress and 
poverty wherever he saw it? This man is a better man 



140 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA." 

than I am or than any of my Nihilistic associates. We 
are steeped in sensualism, we deny God and morality, we 
inveigh against the laws, we spit upon marriage, we are 
pledged to uproot all order in society, we plot assassina- 
tion, and oh, God! I am sworn to murder this upright 
man ! My philosophic ideas are surely false. If, as a re- 
sult of their teachings, we select such a man as worthy of 
death — violent, sudden, murderous death — then surely 
these doctrines teach the extermination of the good and 
the exaltation of the bad! What a hideous world it would 
be to live in where murder and theft and all manner of 
crimes were prescribed by law, but honesty, purity, honor, 
religious sentiment and moral practice were forbidden! 
This man has daughters, like my mother — young, innocent, 
helpless girls. He is their only protector. 1 know he is 
poor in this world's goods. Were he to suddenly die they 
would be cast upon the cold charity of a thoughtless and 
unfeeling world. Suppose my . mother were to die, what 
would become of my own sisters — those loving children 
whom I have cruelly deprived of many comforts by my 
wicked folly of ceasing to labor for them? What a crime 
it would be to assassinate my sisters' mother! Not a whit 
less horrible is the idea of slaughtering this police inspec- 
tor — killing him like a wolf caught in the toils! I will not 
do it! Great God! into what a pit of depravity and in- 
famy I have fallen! I will forsake my associates. I will 
abjure my oath. I will seek to return to the paths of 
rectitude from which I have strayed. If the good are to 
be slaughtered, then it is the bad who are to do the kill- 
ing. I have yearned for a society whence the bad were 



I 

THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 141 



eliminated, where the good only survived. I am pledged, 
however, to just the reverse. 1 wanted to seek Heaven — 
1 am actually increasing the sway of Hell. I see it now, 
fool, idiot, that 1 have been! — dupe of designing men, en- 
trapped by the mirage of a false philosophy, polluted by 
the spells of a sensual sorceress. I will be free! 1 will cast 
off these chains of sin and shame that bind me, and seek 
again to live with innocence and peace of my mother's 
teachings!" 

These, and many more, were the thoughts that passed 
through the boy's mind — thoughts that at the next meet- 
ing of his " Council " he gave utterance in fiery eloquence. 
But he lacked the manly resolution that would have de- 
nounced his associates and their bloodthirsty plottings to 
the civil authorities, thus crushing at one blow one nest of 
poisonous vipers. Instead, he brooded over his condition, 
and devised a thousand and one foolish and futile schemes 
to get rid of his associates. He did not obey the instruc- 
tions given him to await the Inspector of Police in a cer- 
tain locality, then to kill him. Nor did he confide in his 
mother. But he waited, in fretful inaction, for the next 
meeting of his " Council. " On the afternoon of that day 
his mother again besought him to tell her the cause of his 
troubles. 

" Are you a Nihilist, my son?" she asked at length. 

" I can not tell you, mother," he answered in desj^air. 
" But 1 am not worthy to be called your son. God only 
knows the future." 

Then, kissing his mother farewell, he rushed from the 
house in frenzy. But the Tempters had done their work 



142 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

well. His footsteps led him, in despite of his feeble will, 
to the sordid den where his murderous " Council " held 
its orgies of vice and crime. He entered at a time when 
the " Council " was in session, and could not help seeing 
that his whilom cordial comrades were under some strong 
restraint in their manner toward him. This precipitated 
his announcement. Calling the attention of the Chief, he 
announced that he had not obeyed the instructions given 
him, and that he shrunk with unconquerable reluctance 
from doing the bloody deed assigned to him. Instantly 
the council chamber was like a nest of wasps around his 
ears. Mingled denunciation and entreaty greeted him. 

" Coward!" hissed his scarlet-lipped Delilah, smiting him 
full in the. face with her little palm. "Oh, coward! 
Shame to me, that my bosom should have pillowed the 
head of a craven — a dastard! I could kill you, dastard that 
you are!" 

" Comrade," said the unmoved and impassive Chief, with 
the coldness and precision of a machine, "your vows 
are binding on you. There is no going back after you have 
once taken an oath. The Central Committee recognizes 
nothing but unquestioning and implicit obedience at what- 
ever cost. There is one more chance for you. Depart at 
once on your mission and execute it ruthlessly, let the con- 
sequences be what they will, or the vengeance of the Order 
will pursue you aS a traitor to its holy cause! In the name 
of the Central Committee I command you to go immedi- 
ately and kill this Inspector of Police!" 

But the student would not go. Though infirm of will 
he was not deficient in courage — the courage of enthusiasm, 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 1±?> 

which now steeled his nerves and unloosed his tongue to a 
fiery denunciation of the doctrines of the Order. The 
thoughts that had passed through his mind after the last 
meeting of the Council, when the horrible character of the 
deed he was deputed to do had appeared to him in its true 
light, now animated him and he spoke at full length of his 
rejection of the bloody principles of the Order and of his 
determination to leave the Council and its associates at once 
and finally. Throwing upon the table the revolver and 
the vial of poison that had been given him, he declared he 
was forever done with the bloody doctrines that had en- 
thralled him. But he was interrupted by an ominous and 
vindictive howl of wrath: 

" Traitor! Thou art a traitor! The doom of the traitor 
is death!" 

" Kill the traitor!" shrieked his Delilah from lips that 
had so often kissed his in voluptuous caress — " the coward !» 
Kill the traitor!" 

" Comrades," spoke the cold, impassive tones of the 
Chief, " the traitor stands self-confessed, self-convicted. 
The doom of the traitor is death. In the name of the Cen- 
tral Committee, 1 announce his doom. Comrades, execute 
the will of the Central Committee! Kill the traitor." 

" Kill the traitor!" shrieked the fiendish Bacchanalians 
around hirn, and ere time was given him to utter a prayer 
or even to prepare to ward off a blow he was pierced to the 
heart by a dozen knives. The lithe arm of his Delilah 
struck the first blow, which sent a jeweled dagger with 
deadly certainty and effect clear to his heart. "With the 
blood gushing from a dozen fatal stabs he yet was not al- 



144 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

lowed even to die quietly. They hacked and mutilated 
him, as wild beasts tear their prey limb from limb, and 
in a moment's time the young student was a shapeless, 
battered, gruesome mass of lifeless humanity. And the 
fiends about him exulted over their bloody deed. 

Very quickly after he was killed his body was taken 
from the room by order of the Chief, and kept in a secret 
receptacle until late at night, when it was carried by sev- 
eral of the murderers to a secluded spot and there deposit- 
ed like the carcass of a carrion-crow left to rot on the 
dunghill. 

That night the anxious, watchful mother sat up till the 
gray dawn of the morning broke, waiting to welcome her 
boy's returning footsteps. All through the next day she 
watched, and watched in vain. On the second day, however, 
rumor of a dead body having been found in a locality not 
far from her house filled her with dreadful forebodings, and 
she repaired to the place where the remains had been re- 
moved. The body had indeed been mutilated beyond all 
recognition, defaced and gashed in the very wantonness of 
butchery. But the murderers had inadvertently left on 
the body a tell-tale. The student had worn a locket, 
somewhat in the shape of an Icon, which inclosed the pict- 
ure of his mother. That mother, standing over the disfig- 

i 
ured remains, espied this locket. Casting herself, in an 

agony of grief, on the corpse, she drew forth the locket and 
thus made certain what maternal instinct had told her, 
that it was her boy — her boy, her darling son who thus 
lay before her mutilated almost out of the semblance of 
humanity. , 



THE NEW EKA IN EUSSIA. 145 

" My son! my son!" she shrieked in an agony that would 
not be silent. " 1 would have died for you, and lo! they 
have brought you to me, cold, bleeding killed — cruelly 
killed! Is there no justice in Heaven, that my boy was 
killed? Oh, the murderous fiends! And what is our Gov- 
ernment doing?" she shrieked, as, rising from the embrace 
of her dead child, she stood before the gazing crowd like a 
panther robbed of her young. " Is there no God in Rus- 
sia, and no saints to protect the widow and the orphans 
from the bloody knives of these merciless fiends? Oh, 
men, if there is manhood and pity in you, avenge this 
bloody deed and bring the blood-stained wretches who did 
it to justice!" 

Outraged humanity could not stand longer the terrible 
strain which the agony had put upon her. Striving to 
speak again, the bystanders were horrified to see her gasp 
for breath, to note the eyeballs turning up till they Could 
see but a ghastly white, to observe the falling jaw, when, 
with a shriek of distress so infinite, so piteous, so appeal- 
ing that those who heard it will carry its echo in their ears 
to their dying day, she fell prostrate upon the body of 
her son, a corpse! The overstrained nature had given 
way, and the fond mother's heart-strings snapped in the 
agony of grief that the mutilated body of her son had 
aroused. 

These incidents created a widespread commotion in the 
city, and the officers of the law sought diligently for the 
criminals, at last with success. Luckily for the interests 
of justice, a belated wayfarer had seen several men taking 
a burden from a house in the neighborhood of the " Coun- 



146 THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 

oil," and had recognized one of the men as a student of the 
university. 

The latter was quickly arrested, confessed the crime, told 
of his associates, and, as a result, the whole Council was 
arrested, women and men alike, and " exiled " to Siberia. 
And the scarlet-lipped Delilah, whose dagger first struck 
the boy whom she had seduced from innocence presides 
in Siberia over gatherings of her bloody fellow-exiles, 
pours the fragrant tea from steaming urns for her sin- 
stained associates, poses as a political martyr to excite 
the sympathy of her innocent and credulous sex beyond 
Eussian borders, probably while nestled in the caress of 
some brutal associate in the murder, has amused herself 
and her paramours by reciting to some credulous and un- 
sophisticated American magazine writer an imaginative nar- 
ration of her pure and innocent efforts on behalf of a Con- 
stitutional Government for Russia, which had been the sole 
cause of her being torn from home and parents to be ex- 
iled to Siberia. 

All the incidents of this story as related here, even to 
the minutest details, were ascertained after the apprehen- 
sion of these miscreants. The merciful dgjaracter of the 
Eussian Criminal Code may be learned from the fate of 
these prisoners' banishment simply to a distant part of the 
Empire. In all other civilized countries the gallows and 
the penitentiary for life would have been the penalty im- 
posed upon them for their crimes: In New York, of the 
United States of America, the Delilah 1 have described 
above would have sat in the electrocutor's chair for 
a few minutes, and then, immured in a pine box, been 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 147 

hurried away out of sight beneath the sod of Potter's Field, 
instead of sitting in the hostess's chair at Siberian social 
gatherings, pouring tea for her blood-stained, associates and 
boasting of her crimes as " patriotic sacrifices." Perhaps 
the New York plan presents the greater advantage to so- 
ciety — as at present constituted. 

But Nihilism wars not only with adult society, with in- 
spectors of police, with university students, with refined 
and loving matrons. It spares no age nor condition. It 
seeks its recruits for a bloody grave from the cradle of in- 
fancy as well as from the student's desk or the merchant's 
counting-room, and cuts the throats of young babies with 
as much glee as it hacks the windpipes of bearded men. 
I will relate but one more instance of Nihilistic wickedness, 
showing the utterly irreclaimably wicked nature of its 
believers. Wherever Nihilism exists there is no safety for 
the babe in the cradle, if the slaughter of such little inno- 
cents can add a penny to the pockets of a Nihilist. 

In another city of Russia dwelt an employe of the Russian 
Civil Service who occupied a very humble position in that 
service. He had one daughter, an unusually intelligent 
and handsome girl, who had early manifested a great ar- 
dor in study and an absorbing thirst for knowledge. When 
she was about twelve years old she attracted the attention 
of a wealthy merchant of that city, a gentleman of kind heart 
and philanthropic views. The girl's modesty, amiability and 
brightness, as well as her unusual grace and beauty, aroused 
a deep interest in his bosom. He knew her father and sym- 
pathized with the latter's efforts to give his daughter a good 
education, but fully realized that the latter was pecuniarily 



148 THE NEW EEA IN RUSSIA. 

unable to attain his wishes in this respect. After some medi- 
tation he proposed to the father that he would adopt his girl 
as his own daughter, educate her finely and make her in every 
sense as much his child as those of his own blood. His 
offer was accepted, and the girl transferred to the palatial 
home of her adopted father. Here every advantage that 
wisdom could suggest and money secure was given her. 
She made great progress in her studies, and at school was 
regarded as little short of a prodigy. If her intellect was 
brilliant her character seemed perfect, and she was every- 
where regarded as a young lady who united the extremes of 
feminine grace, beauty, and amiability to an accute and 
brilliant mind. Her intellect was of an original type, and 
she drank deeply from the fountains of philosophy, as well 
as from the streams of art and science. While at school 
this fondness of hers for philosophical thoughts was ob- 
served by some older students who had been seduced into 
joining the Nihilists, and they placed in her hands the 
works of Bakunin, with strict injunctions to read in secrecy. 
" Stolen waters are sweet " always. She read, and was con- 
verted. Poor child! She did not seek any guiding hand to 
point out the fearful sophistries of this writer; but with 
imagination enlisted and fancy enthralled she fell into the 
pitfall of perdition dug by this author for the youthful and 
the immature, and having surrendered her judgment to 
their keeping with feminine self-sacrifice, she threw the 
whole enthusiasm of her nature into her belief. She was 
enrolled as a member of a Nihilistic Circle. Here, as they 
had corrupted her judgment, they speedily debauched her 
innocence, and the young girl became theirs body and 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 149 

soul. Of all this, however, her adopted parents were pro- 
foundly ignorant, and the girFs enthusiasm for the vis- 
ionary ideas she had imbibed was so fresh and strong that 
no unsuspecting person could read in her face the fearful 
story, that, young as she was, she had lost the Eden of in- 
nocence and was threading the thorny ways of the Wilder- 
ness of Sin. After her school life had ended — ended with 
high honors and praise — she went back to her adopted 
parents' house, their petted darling. Her foster-father had 
two young children, mere babies, too young to be sent to 
school, so he willingly accepted the elder girl's proposition 
to become their tutor until they were old enough for school. 
The young tutor, who was indeed singularly enthusiastic in 
temperament and profoundly unsuspicious of the wicked- 
ness of the human heart, was not long left to herself by the 
members of her Nihilistic Circle. She was summoned to a 
meeting of her Council. It was there proposed to make 
a demand on her adopted father for 100,000 rubles 
($65,000) for the cause of Nihilism, or in plain language, to 
help keep the leaders of the gang in luxury and pay the 
expenses of planning and committing murders. The mer- 
chant in question was very wealthy, and hence the large 
amount of the demand. His adopted daughter was made 
acquainted with the plan and undertook to help carry it 
out. To such an extent had her moral sense been en- 
feebled and her reason taken captive by the pernicious doc- 
trines she had imbibed, that she did not hesitate to adopt a 
course involving ingratitude to her benefactor, treachery to 
her family, and robbery to her own protector. A letter 
making a demand for the above mentioned sum was pre- 



150 THE NEW ERA IN EUSSIA. 

pared, without name, and sent to the merchant. He re- 
ceived, but laughed at it, regarding it as a silly and stupid 
practical joke, and paid no attention to its demand. But in a 
few days thereafter he was amazed and startled to find on his 
table another letter addressed to him, written on paper with 
black borders, making the same demand. How the letter 
came there he could not ascertain. His servants knew 
nothing about it. No one about the house had seen the 
messenger who delivered it. Still the merchant regarded 
the matter as a hoax, and paid no attention to it beyond 
the moment's suspense. A few nights afterward, however, 
as he was about going to bed, he was indeed startled and 
troubled by finding upon his pillow another letter, gar- 
nished with borders of black, which informed him that if by 
a certain hour he did not give to a man who would appear 
on the stoop of his house the sum of 100,000 roubles his 
two baby children would be killed. 

Naturally, this letter troubled him. The mystery sur- 
rounding its reception bewildered him. Not for a moment 
did he suspect any connivance with this attempt at rob- 
bery of his adopted daughter, whom he loved as a father 
and whom he regarded as the most tender-hearted and 
amiable of young women. But the letter was there — evi- 
dently placed by somebody. It had not fallen from the 
clouds, nor had it been blown iuto the window. For the 
first time the merchant felt that " the White Terror " was 
not indeed a myth, as he had all along considered. He 
determined, however, to place the matter in the hands of 
the police on the morrow, and gave no thought to the vis- 
itor he was informed would call upon him in the dead hour 



THE NEW EEA IN RUSSIA. 151 

of night for so large a sum of money. But in the morn- 
ing his babies were missing. With a sinking horror at 
heart, the merchant ordered search to be made for them, 
and they were speedily found. In the back yard of their 
home, within hearing of their parents, the two babies lay 
dead and mutilated, covered in their own blood. In the 
dead of night they had been taken from their cradles by 
more than devils, and under the very windows of their fa- 
ther's chamber their cries had been stifled, their throats 
cut, their tender little bodies mutilated as if by a veritable 
ghoul. Ah! the sickening horror, the piteous agony of 
that morning hour when the father looked upon his 
babies, stiff and stark in death, lying in a pool of their 
own clotted blood, and mutilated with a ferocity that we 
ascribe to devils because we are reluctant to believe hu- 
man beings can be guilty of it. Let every father and 
mother picture what would be their feelings to find, on 
awaking some morning, their darling babies missing and 
then to discover their dead and disfigured bodies lying on 
the cold stones of the garden-path. My pen can not paint 
such a horrible reality in colors vivid enough to describe 
the scene, much less depict the mother's agony, the fa- 
ther's grief, as they bend, in tearless horror over the gory 
corses of their murdered babes. 

The police immediately began the search for the mur- 
derers. It was a difficult work. Clue by clue they pro- 
ceeded, step by step they progressed, until suspicion fell 
upon the adopted daughter, who was suddenly arrested. 
This added to the grief-stricken parents' agony. They 
would not, could not believe that their adopted daughter, 



152 THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 

who owed so much to them, the object of their tenderest 
love and care, who seemed an angel of love and light, was 
so vile and bloody a devil as to do this ghoulish deed. But 
the truth will out. The girl made a confession — confessed 
with reluctance, and without manifesting the slightest 
sense of contrition at her bloody deed, that she was a part 
and parcel of the plot that began with attempted robbery 
and ended with consummated murder. She it was who 
placed the letters on her father's table and on his pillow, 
She it was who let into the house in the dead watches of 
the night, while her parents slept, two students with 
whom she had been intimate in Nihilistic associations; she 
it was who took from their cradles the sleeping babies, and 
muffling their innocent young heads to stifle their cries, 
turned them over to her male companions, who, with her 
active help, cut the throats of the infants and so wantonly 
and horribly mutilated their tender young bodies. In the 
annals of human crime no more devilish a deed is recorded 
— nor is s,uch a piteous tale of fiendish barbarity and do- 
mestic treachery to be found in any annals except the 
blood-stained chronicles of Nihilism! 

The law took the murderers in hand. The two stu- 
dents were sentenced to labor in the Siberian mines, and 
the girl, who belonged by birth to the privileged classes, 
was banished to Siberia. 

It is with such criminals only that the Eussian "Ad- 
ministrative Process " deals, and its severest punishment 
is confinement in the prison of Schlusselberg — a prison 
copied from the English penitentiaries, and which in its 
appointments is practically a duplicate of Auburn or Sing 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 153 

Sing. Yet in the interests of such foul-hearted criminals 
as those I have just spoken about it is the fashion for 
Nihilists and their sympathizers in this country to de- 
nounce the Russian Criminal Code as the very essence of 
barbarous cruelty. 

Would any American jury, with the facts clearly 
proven, have banished this girl to a distant part of the 
country, there to have her full liberty, and condemned her 
male associates to imprisonment at hard labor only? 
Would not such American jury, especially if any fathers 
had been on it, have sent all three to the gallows? And 
would not every American mother, as she clasped her lit- 
tle baby to her arms, have thanked God that justice had 
overtaken such wicked fiends? 

The preceding is a full, fair, truthful exposition of the 
" Propaganda " and its workings, as it existed. For it 
does not exist now. It wrought incredible crimes and 
produced untold individual sufferings, but it failed to ac- 
complish anything for its instigators, except the proceeds 
of a successful robbery now and then. Its methods were 
hostile to the genius of the Russian people, and they would 
have none of it. The Government dealt with it sternly 
and put it down with a strong, though, as I have shown, a 
very merciful hand. 

Its ultimate effect upon the Russian people was to in- 
tensify their love for existing institutions and stimulate 
their devotion to the existing Government. Just as the 
wicked but foolish and silly deeds of the Anarchists in the 
United States have made our people disgusted with the 
doctrines of Socialism and Anarchy, and demonstrated to 



154 THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 

them in most brilliant colors the incalculable value of our 
institutions and our laws, so have the crimes committed by 
the " Propaganda " in Russia served but to strengthen the 
Emperor and confirm the love his people bear for him. 
Nihilism, as an organized institution, 1 repeat, does not 
exist in Russia. Crime does, and criminals abound in 
Russia as in all the rest of the world, but it is crime of the 
usual vulgar type, not the insane manifestations of dis- 
ordered intellects crazed by thinking of matters too deep 
for their comprehension. The " {Siberian exile " is a 
murderer, a thief, or other vulgar criminal. He may, 
and often does, tell his interviewing visitors that he is a 
" prisoner of state " for " political " reasons; but only so 
far as the punishment of murder, arson, burglary, theft, 
etc. is a " political " matter does he tell the truth. 
Nihilism has been banished, from Russia. It exists, it is 
true, but is confined chiefly to London, England, and New 
York, in the United States. Its leaders are mendicants, 
living on supplies obtained from credulous people by false 
pretenses and representations. It has been a profitable 
trade, but it is rapidly declining, and the century will not 
expire before an avowed Nihilist the world over will be 
locked up in an asylum as a lunatic or hanged on a gal- 
lows as a murderer. 

The common sense of mankind may safely be trusted to 
give a correct judgment "in the long run," and that 
common, sense has decided that organized murder and 
arson are not the steps whereby to attain " Constitu- 
tional " Government, or the best school in which to train 
honest, upright, patriotic, self-governing citizens. Nihil- 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 155 

ism is a relic of- barbarism, and, like all such antiquated 
fragments, has no place in the practical, political, indus- 
trial life of the latter part of the nineteenth century. 

There are but two parties to-day in Russia — the Im- 
perial, or National party, and the " Reactionists," who 
favor a return to niediasval despotism. Despite what is so 
vociferously asserted by the Nihilists outside of Russia and 
by their sympathizers and abettors abroad, there is no Re- 
publican party in Russia. There never has been, except 
the deluded and weak-minded students I have mentioned; 
and their numbers, always trifling, are now so small as 
not to be worth the counting. Therefore no demand for 
a " Constitutional" Government beyond what already ex- 
ists in that Empire is made. There is nobody to make it. 
The Nihilists outside of Russia and their newspaper allies 
of England and the United States insist, contrary to the 
facts, that there is a " Liberal " party in Russia, and that 
the following are their demands: 

1st. A general amnesty for all political offenders who 
have committed no crime but resistance and- re- 
monstrance to the present state of affairs. 

2d. Freedom of speech. 

3rd. Freedom of the press. 

4th. Freedom of public meeting and public discussion 
of political affairs, such as exists in England. 

5th. The right of petition to the Czar and the con- 
sideration of petitions by him. 

6th. The abolition of the secret police and of star-cham- 
ber trials, and the privilege of meeting accusers 
face to face. 



156 THE NEW EEA IN EUSSIA. 

7th. Open trials for all offenders by juries subject to 

the challenge of the accused.' 
8th. The election of a law-making body by the people, 

with free electoral agitation and a free ballot. 

Now, be it remembered that there are no people in 
Eussia except a very few idle dreamers and enthusiasts 
(too few, indeed, to be mentioned), who make such de- 
mands in Eussia. But supposing that there was a party 
with such a platform, I will briefly show the folly and the 
insincerity of these demands. 

1st. ' ' A general amnesty for all political offenders who 
have committed no crime except resistance or remon- 
strance to the present state of affairs " would open the 
prison-doors and turn loose upon society the vilest and 
most depraved wretches that ever violated a law. I assert 
boldly and emphatically that there are no political offend- 
ers in Eussia, except depraved criminals who have com- 
mitted crime while talking of politics. There has been no 
" resistance or remonstrance to the present state of 
affairs " in Eussia, except the murders and assassinations 
1 have dwelt upon above — the ' butchery of babes in their 
cradles to extort money from their parents, the assassina" 
tion of officers of the law, midnight pillage, arson, burg- 
lary, and assaults. A "general amnesty" to such 
offenders would be the same thing in Eussia as opening 
the prison-doors and letting the criminals loose to prey 
upon society would be in England and America. There 
are*-no "political offenders " in Eussia, pure and simple. 
A murderer or a burglar has no right to have his crimes 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 157 

pardoned by simply calling himself a " political offender," 
or asserting that he committed the murder or the burglary 
to further interests of a " Constitutional " Government 
project. This first article in the fictitious Eepublican 
platform of the mythical Eussian Eepublican party is ab- 
surd and impossible. 

2d. "Freedom of speech." Freedom of speech does 
exist in Eussia when it is not coupled with murder or riot. 
All men can and do speak their sentiments freely in Eus- 
sia when they are not conspirators against the law, or the 
peace of society, or avowed advocates of doctrines that lead 
only to Anarchy. Leo Tolstoi, the novelist, is a promi- 
nent instance of the truth of what I say. Tolstoi does not 
believe in government of any kind. He advocates a com- 
munity of goods. He is opposed to all extrinsic law in the 
abstract. He believes in the equality of all men, and de- 

# 

spises all distinctions of rank, and preaches against all 
social differences. His views on marriage are heterodox 
in the extreme and liable to fie miscomprehended, and 
consequently to produce moral harm. He is, in short, a 
Socialist of the most extreme type, but of the most ethe- 
real character. He is a Communist after the teachings of 
the Jewish Essenes. He is opposed to the making of 
oaths, to war, to violence of any kind. He is an ardent 
advocate of non-resistance in everything. He bitterly 
condemns murder, arson, pillage, violence, hypocrisy, or 
falsehood. He advocates purity of heart as well as of life, 
and indeed is ultra-monastic in his views herein. He ac- 
cepts Christianity as it was literally taught in the New 
Testament, and insists that no alteration shall be made in 



158 THE NEW EEA IN" EUSSIA. 

the text, do interpretation explanatory of the literal mean- 
ing be given. He would not adapt any of the teachings 
of Christ to the necessities of different ages or peoples. 
He is an enthusiast, a visionary of the most exalted type. 
Pure as the dawn, honest as the sunlight, unsuspecting 
and optimistic, he lives in every detail of life what he 
preaches. He is, in short, a Slavonian Essene, a Gnostic 
of the nineteenth century after Christ, a neo-Platonist 
trained and educated in the schools of modern thought. 
He rejects the idea of personal property, but believes that 
no man should eat until after he has earned by hard labor 
the food that he desires. Holding these views, Count 
Tolstoi advocates them with zeal and ability. He ad- 
dresses a constituency of many millions through the medi- 
um of his novels. He is idolized by an immense follow- 
ing of disciples, most of them simple-minded, honest- 
hearted Slavonian peasants, who imitate him faithfully in 
deed even if they are unable to fraternize understandingly 
with him in thought, T? his man is a power in the world. 
He is a thinker who brings into alliance with his thought 
the incalculable power of a life whose practice in every de- 
tail squares rigidly with his precepts. He speaks and 
writes what he pleases. But the Kussian Government has 
never interfered with him. The liberty of speech and the 
liberty of the press in his case are absolute. He is a good 
ma n — visionary, it is true, doubtless mistaken in many of 
his views — trying to shut up in the prison-house of the let- 
ter the spirit who animates and vivifies but dwells above 
and beyond the letter. Though his views, when reduced 
to practice, are, like those of all other visionaries, liable to 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 159 

be corrupted and to produce, therefore, evils worse than 
those which they are intended to correct, he has always 
had full liberty to do as he pleased regarding the dissemi- 
nation of those views. He formed a Communistic society 
sharing his peculiar views. The Government did not in- 
terfere with that. It dwindled away and finally died out, 
it is true, but its decadence was due solely to the imprac- 
ticability of the ideas underlying it, and not in the slight- 
est to Government interference. I emphatically assert 
that any man in Eussia enjoys the same freedom of speech 
and of the press as Leo Tolstoi if he condemns bloodshed, 
lawlessness and crime as Tolstoi does. That freedom of 
speech and freedom of the press are restricted in Russia is 
as true as they are restricted all over the world — as they 
are restricted in the United States of America. It has 
been but a year or two since Johan Most left Black well's 
Island, having served out a year's sentence in that prison 
for publishing in his paper, Die Freiheit, what he wanted 
to say. He served a two years' term in an English prison 
for a similar offense against the laws which in free Eng- 
land restrict the liberty of the press. 

On page of this work, 1 quote from the New 

York Herald a fall account of the suppression of free 
speech in Newark, N. J., by the despotic police of free 
America — a meeting of Anarchists and Nihilists who 
sought, peaceably, to ventilate their doctrines and to dis- 
cuss their wild theories in liberty. The Eussian police 
never showed more activity in watching the movements 
and dispersing the meetings of suspected Nihilists than the 
Chicago and New York police do in keeping Anarchists 



160 THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 

and Socialists in those cities from exercising " free 
speech." Why should Russia, then, grant to the clamor 
of visionaries outside her borders what the United States 
of America and England resolutely and sternly deny to 
their own citizens? 

It is true that free speech and a free press have restric- 
tions placed on them in Russia, but it is equally true that 
every other nation in the world places equal restrictions 
(in many cases far greater restrictions) upon free speech 
and a free press. But the conditions of life in Russia, the 
character of her social fabric, the nature of her people, 
are essentially different from those in England and the 
United States. "We all acknowledge that even in America 
the demagogical spirit so freely exhibited and the licentious 
conduct of the press are fraught with great and menacing 
evils to our institutions. If this be true in America, 
among a people trained by centuries of education and 
practice to the exercise of self-government, cool and con- 
servative in mind, temperate in spirit, and devoted as a 
matter both of principle and self-interest to their institu- 
tions, how much greater such evils would be in Russia 
among a people whose civilization is but a matter of yes- 
terday, who are yet in the infancy of their existence, who 
are only just beginning to know their gigantic and impetu- 
ous strength? For unchecked liberty of speech and of the 
press invariably are abused, in many instances, in both 
England and America, those two countries which form the 
models of " Constitutional " Governments and of unre- 
stricted rights. The abuse of these privileges among an 
excitable and turbulent people like the Russians would 



THE NEW ERA IN EUSSIA. 161 

produce riot, insurrection, revolution, Anarchy, and the 
consequent retardation of civilization. How unjust, how 
absurd, then, for a man to insist that the same institu- 
tions shall be applied to all peoples alike, without regard 
to their fitness or adaptability. It is just as absurd to in- 
sist on Russia adopting the laws and institutions of the 
United States or of England as to' insist that Russians 
shall give up the use of their native tongue and henceforth 
speak only the English language. Nay, the bed of Pro- 
custes is not the proper standard by which shall be tested 
the mind or the worth of a nation's institutions. 

What I have said above will apply equally to the fourth 
alleged demand of the alleged Republican party of Russia. 
It is included in free speech and a free press. 

5th. The people of Russia already have the most unre- 
stricted right of petition to the Emperor, and every Rus- 
sian well knows that every petition is considered by the 
Czar. 

6th. " The abolition of the secret police " is just such 
an absurd and preposterous demand as would be the de- 
mand of the thieves and thugs of New York for the aboli- 
tion of Inspector Byrnes's detective force. It is too 
absurd to merit any attention. 

7th. " Open trials for all offenders by juries " is what 
the people of Russia already have. Every magazine writer 
or journalist who asserts the contrary either does not 
know what he is talking about, or else lies, wilfully, 
knowingly, maliciously. Both grand juries and petit ju- 
ries, modelled after those of the United States, are a well- 
known feature of Russian criminal jurisprudence. A 



162 THE NEW ERA IS EUSSTA. 

person charged with a crime is tried by a jury which is 
subject to his challenge; he has his accusers brought face 
to face with him; in short, a Russian criminal trial, up 
to the verdict of the jury, is a duplication of the same 
affair in the United States. But in Russia the convicted 
criminal enjoys a privilege denied to his fellow in the 
United States. The Russian convict has the right of ap- 
peal for reversal of judgment to the Minister of the In- 
terior, from him to the Senate, and from the Senate to the 
Emperor. A denial of these facts shows either gross ig- 
norance or willful falsehood. 

The so-called " star-chamber trials " in Russia, trials by 
" Administrative Process, " are of rare occurrence, and are 
resorted to only in cases of Nihilistic wanton butchery. 
An organized conspiracy of sworn assassins requires for 
their extermination a modification of the usual machinery 
of the law adapted to ordinary cases of crime. In the 
United States the Court of Judge Lynch very often takes 
the place of the " Administrative Process " in Russia, and 
with good effect upon the morals of the community, al- 
though Judge Lynch's punishments are far more severe 
and much more summary than those of the Russian " Ad- 
ministrative Process." 

The Russians are governed on the same general princi- 
ples as are all other civilized nations. The alleged de- 
mand by an alleged Republican party for an Imperial 
parliament is not heard in Russia, because no man in Rus- 
sia wants it. Russia, under her present general system of 
government, has made extraordinary progress in wealth, 
power and civilization, and her people are satisfied to go 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 163 

ou with the same system. If there is such a demand it 
conies altogether from foreigners who have no right to dic- 
tate to Russians how they shall be governed, or from Rus- 
sian criminal refugees who wish, under the cry of 
" political reform/' to cover up their own infamy, and to 
obtain, without honest work or any other rational equiva- 
lent therefor, a means of livelihood. But, granting the 
assumption that there are Russians of honesty and good 
sense who actually demand such a parliament, they can all 
be answered in a few words, thoroughly and finally. 
There are several unassailable objections to a Russian par- 
liament. Such a body, which must include representa- 
tives of all the classes, creeds, and nationalities, would be 
a Babel of confusion and a bedlam of conflicting interests. 

Imagine a parliamentary body composed of Poles, Ger- 
mans, Cossacks, Tartars, Mahometans, Greek Catholics, 
Roman Catholics, Turkomans, Jews, Copts, and scores of 
other wholly dissimilar races and nationalities and sects, 
bitterly opposed and strongly antagonistic to each other. 
Could such a body legislate for a great empire like Russia? 
Would the same legislation answer for the Pole and Tar- 
tar, for the Mahometan and the Roman Catholic? 1 be- 
lieve not; and I am confident that my opinion is shared by 
all the intelligent citizens of Russia, except a few idle 
dreamers and enthusiasts. 

It will require very many years to educate the great mass 
of the Russian people up to the proper appreciation of con- 
stitutional government, even at the rapid rate of progress 
made under the Romanoff dynasty, and until this educa- 
tion is accomplished centralization of power in the hands 



1G4 THE NEW ERA IN" RUSSIA. 

of the Czar and his councillors and its judicious exercise is 
the only governmental system capable of saving Russia 
from dismemberment and disruption. The division of the 
Empire into provinces ruled directly by a governor ap- 
pointed by the Czar and a council selected from among the 
people thereof amounts to a practical local self-govern- 
ment, and the erection of each of the many distinct nation- 
alities into separate provinces removes all the danger of a 
clashing of interests such as would be sure to result from 
any imperial parliamentary system. Another, and by no 
means a lesser, advantage to be derived from the present 
system is the gradual and healthy assimilation which is 
going steadily forward, and which will surely result in 
breaking the tribal and racial barriers now operating to 
the disadvantage of the country. 

To the true Russian patriot the condition of Russia to- 
day is highly satisfactory and gratifying. Prosperity 
abounds within her borders. The reign of law is supreme, 
and the people are zealous in sustaining all efforts of the 
Government to preserve domestic peace and secure internal 
order. Education is making phenomenal progress. The 
capacities of the Slavic race for rational self-government 
are rapidly developing. The Empire is already invulner- 
able to attacks from without — internal tranquillity and 
harmony are now, after long struggle, firmly assured. 
Homogeniety of the many races forming the Empire is but 
a question of time, as the nucleus around which all revolve, 
the Russian Slav is united, compact, and impregnably 
homogeneous. The disorders, the distresses, the weak- 
nesses of the nation have all passed away with the epoch 



THE NEW ERA IN RUSSIA. 1G5 

that bore them, and the New Era in Eussia is an accom- 
plished fact with all the national splendors it promises, 
with all the individual happiness it guarantees. With the 
end of the Old Era passed away all prospect of disruption 
or decline, and enduring stability both of existence and of 
institution is guaranteed in the New Era, whose magnifi- 
cence sheds a luster of glory upon the vast and compacted 
dominions of "the Emperor." That foreign jealousies 
will be awakened and foreign rivalries be encountered there 
is no doubt. Such is the inevitable destiny of nations — 
and Eussia is not exempt from the operations of natural 
law. 

But these jealousies can not hinder her progress, and 
these rivalries will but stimulate her course. Eussia has a 
mission to perform which, doubt not, she will perform 
with vigor and thoroughness. What that mission in its 
full completeness may be can not be told except by in- 
spired prophecy. But enough has been done to show that 
a part at least of Eussian destiny is to civilize the vast ter- 
ritories and the numerous hordes of Central Asia — to re- 
illume the fires that theoretically burned so brightly in 
the Teutonic system of chivalry, but which for various 
reasons died down and smoldered under the ashes of false- 
hood, hypocrisy, and corruption — to restore to the heart 
of humanity that enthusiasm for the true and the just 
which is characteristic of youth, whether of the individual 
or the race, but which has faded and declined in age, both 
of persons and of nations; in a word, to advance the cause 
of Christ and extend the sway of His kingdom. Years 
may elapse ere these glorious ends be attained. Infinite 



166 THE NEW EEA IN KUSSIA. 

turmoil and woe may be the price to be paid for every up- 
ward step toward those ends, but be sure they will ulti- 
mately be attained. The mission of Eussia is a noble one. 
Her Emperor fills the most responsible position that mor- 
tal man can hold, but his glory and his recompense will be 
commensurate with his toil. And when finally in the 
grand "Federation of the Nations/' in the sublime and 
harmonious council of mankind, fully civilized, genuinely 
Christianized, happy and contented, when man shall have 
at length attained his full stature and developed his full 
powers, Russia will proudly point to her mission accom- 
plished and her Emperor laying down the onerous cafes of a 
ceremonious and a toilsome royalty will be endued with 
the insignia of a still more regal authority, the love, the 
respect, and the gratitude of the redeemed and regenerated 
world. 



THE END. 



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Mother and Child after Delivery; Period of Nursing Influence; Foeticide; Disease? 
Peculiar to Women; Diseases Peculiar to Men; Masturbation; Sterility; and Im- 
potence; Subjects of which More Might be Said; A Happy Married Life— How 
Secured. 

The book is a handsome 8VO, and contains over 400 PAGES, with more than 
TOO ILLUSTRATIONS, and is sold at the following PRICES— ENGLISH CLOTH, 
BEVELED BOARDS, GILT SIDE AND BACK, $3.00; LEATHER, SPRINKLED 
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$4.00. Sent by mail, post-paid, to any address, on receipt of price. 

COMMENDATIONS. 

"In a carefnl examination of Dr. Cowan's SCIENCE OF A NEW LIFE. I 
am prepared to give it my very cordial approval. It deserves to be in every family, 
and read and pondered, as closaly relating to the highest moral and physical well- 

beiag of all its members The essential remedy for these 

great evils is to he found in Dr. Cowan's work; therefore, Ofty it be circulated far 
«vnd wide." William Llotd Garrison. 

" As it is easier to generate a race of healthy men ana women than to regenerate 
the diseased and discordant humanity we now have, I heartily recommend the study 
»f THE SCIENCE OF A NEW LIFE to every father and mother in the land." 

Elizabeth Cadt Stanton. 

"It seems to us to he one of the wisest, and purest, and most helpful of those 
Books which have been written in recent years, with the intention of teaching 
Men and Women the Truths about their Bodies, which are of peculiar importance 
to the morals of Society. .... No one can begin to imagine the misery that 
has come upon the human family solely through ignorance upon this subject." 

The Christian Union. 

If, after reading tht above, you wish to get a copy of the book, send us th€ 
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Agents wanted to whom we offer liberal terms. Send to us at once for our 
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J*. O. BOX 9767- MOSS 8XMSJET, NSW YQ&K, 



A $10.00 BOOK FOR $2.50! 

MOORE'S 

UNIVERSAL ASSISTANT AND COMPLETE MECHANIC, 

Containing over One Million Industrial Facts, 

CALCULATIONS, PROCESSES, TRADE SECRETS, RULES, LEGAL 
ITEMS, BUSINESS FORMS, etc., in every Occupation, from the 
Household to the Manufactory. 



A work ef unequaled utility to every Mechanic, Parmer, Merchant, 

Business Man, Professional Gentleman, and Householder, as it enibraoea 

the main points in over 200 Trades and Occupations. It contains 1016 

pages and over 500 illustrations. 

The following synopsis gives some idea of the value and scope of the 

work. The contents are as follows: 

Part 1.— Bread, Cracker, Pastry and Cake Baking, Domestic Cooking, etc. 

Part 2.— For Farmers, Horse Shoers, Stock Owners, Bee Keepers, etc. 

Part 3.— For Lumbermen, Carpenters, Builders. Contractors, Mill Owners, 
Shipbuilders, Ship Owners, Freighters, Navigators, Quarrymen, 
Merchants and Business Men generally. 

Part 4.— Natural Mechanical and Scientific Facts. 

Part 5.— For Dyers, Clothiers, Bleachers, Hatters, Furriers and Manufac,. 
turers. 

Part 6.— Medical Department, for Druggists, Physicians, Dentists, Perfum- 
ers, Barbers, and general Family Use. 

Part 7.— For Grocers, Tobacconists, Confectioners, Saloon Keepers, Syrups. 
Cordials, Ice Creams, Summer Drinks, Domestic Wines, Canned 
Goods, Soaps, etc. 

tfart 8.— For Tanners and Curriers, Boot, Shoe, Harness and Rubber Manu- 
facturers, Marble and Ivory Workers, Bookbinders, Anglers, Trap- 
pers, etc. 

Part 9.— For Painters, Decorators, Cabinet Makers, Piano and Organ Man- 
ufacturers, Polishers, Carvers, Gilders, Picture Frame and Art 
Dealers, China Decorators, Potters, Glass Manufacturers, Glasa 
Stainers and Gilders, Architects, Masons, Bricklayers, Plasterers, 
Stucco Workers, Kalsotuiners, Slaters, Roofers, etc. 

Part 10.— For Watchmakers, Jewelers, Gold and Silversmiths, Gilders, 
Burnishers, Colorers, Enamelers, Lapidaries, Diamond Cutters. 
Engravers, Die Sinkers, Stencil Cutters, Refiners, Sweepmelters. 

Part 11.— For Engineers, Firemen, Engine Builders, Steam Fitters, Master 
Mechanics, Machinists, Blacksmiths, Cutlers, Locksmiths, Saw, 
Spring, and Safe Manufacturers, Iron and Brass Founders, Mill 
Owners, Miners, etc. 

Part 12,— For Art Workers, Bronzing, Dipping and Lacquering, Brass Fin- 
ishers, Hardware Dealers, Plumbers, Gas Fitters, Tinman, Japan- 
ners, etc. 

Part 13 —For Printers and Publishers, Gas Companies and Consumers, Gun« 
smiths. Contractors, Quarrymen, Coal Dealers, Oil Manufacturers, 
Sugar Refiners, Paper Manufacturers, Cotton and Woolen Manu 
f acturers, Cutlers, Needle and File Manufacturers, Metal Smelters, 
etc., etc. 

Part 14.— The Amenities of Life, Useful Advice. 

Part 15.— Tables, etc., Embracing Useful Calculations in every Business. 

Price in Cloth Binding, $2.50; in Leather Binding, $3.50. Standard Ex- 
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P. O. Box 2767. 57 Rose Street, New York. 



GOOD HANDWRITING OFTEN LEADS TO A FORTUNE I 
A few of fite Best Autographs, showing improvement from using 

GASKELL'S COMPENDIUM 

Of 8EI.F.TEACHING PENMANSHIP. 

The best specimens of improvement come from Mr. Harrie M. Reeves, in the 
office of the Canada Southern _ Railway Lines, at Detroit, Mich., his elegant pen- 
manship securing him the position. We give here his portrait and autograph? 
-'both old and new) : 

[Hon. Henry Watterson in Answers 
to. Correspondents in the Louisville 
Courier-Journal .] 

"We have received a number of in- 
quiries concerning this system of self- 
teaching penmanship,and reply here that 
it is valuable. Anyone who will follow 
the methods laid down in it, and give 
due application thereto, will consider that 
a most excellent investment of a dollar 
has been made. The Compendium 
places good handwriting within the reack 
of everyone, and its success has beec 
demonstrated by the sale m this country 
and England of over Three Hundrea. 
thousand copies." 

[N. V. Daily Witness.} 
"The salient advantages of Gaskell's 
system are its legibility, rapidity and 
beauty. * * * There is no style of writing;, 
plain or ornamental business or epistolary, 
for lady or gentleman, which is not includ- 
ed in this admirable system. And wc 
think that if anything at all could fire 
an indifferent writer with a desire to be- 
come an expert and elegant penman, an 
inspection of Mr. Gaskell's system would 
do so." 
[Hon. James A. Weston, Ex- 
Governor of New Hampshire ; 
in a note to the Publisher^ 
"You will permit me to say that 
it far surpasses anything of the 
kind that has ever come to my 
notice, and I take pleasure in re- 
commending it to the attention of 
all who desire to learn to write 
rapidly and well. With this as a 
gu'de, and tact and application on 
the part of the learner, a beautiful 
handwriting may be acquired at a 
trifling expense." 

GASKELL'S COMPEN- 
DIUM consists of a full series of 
COPY SLIPS, PRINTED 
INSTRUCTIONS, ORNA- 
MENTAL FLOURISH- 
ING, LETTERING, PEN-DRAWING LADIES' PENMAN- 
SHIP, &c., &C. By means of this self-teaching system anyone can a 
cquire a rapid and beautiful handwriting at odd hours, without a teacher. It is the 
finest series of penmanship ever published, and put up in durable and elegant form. 
PRICE, ONE DOLLAR, for which it will be mailed, prepaid anywhere. Yoa 
need not take the trouble to go to the Post-office to get a money order or to register 
your letter, but, as you finish reading this, enclose a one dollar bill in your leltet 
and send it at our risk. Address all orders to 

GASKELL'S COMPENDIUM, P. 0. Box 2767, New York. 





Former Style 





Present Style. 



JUST PVBLISHED. 



PHLLISSR'S 



Miscellaneous Architectural Designs and Details 




CARPENTERS AND BUILD- 
ERS, MECHANICS AND 
ALL PEOPLE IN- 
TENDING TO 
BUILD. 

BY THE MOST POPULAR 
ARCHITECTS, 

PALLISER, PALLIEER & CO. 



Miniature cut of Stable and Carriage House, 
by Palliser, Palliser & Co., Architects, New York. 



This work contains 96 pages , 
mostly all plates 1 1x14 in size, 
nearly 1,000 drawings and il- 
lustrations, giving plans, ele- 
^ vations and perspective views 
of Barns, Stables and Carriage 
Houses, Greenl.o i?e, Sum- 
mer House, a Model Poul- 
try House, Outhouses, Bath Houses and Pavilion, 3 Designs for Cottages of 
moderate cost, 3 Frame Double Houses, 3 Southern Houses, 2 Villas— with De- 
vils, 11 City Brick Fronts— with Details, 4 Frame Low-Cost Tenement Houses— 
with Details. Also Details of Brick, Terra Cotta and Wooden Mantels in great 
variety, Stairs, Newels, Posts, Rails and Balusters, Fences, Gateways, Railings, 
etc., Elevation and Section of Brick and Stone Bank Front- with Plan of Front, 
Brick Cornices and Sections, 9 Iron Finials and Crests, 5 Terra Cotta Finials aud 
Ridge Crests, 6 Wood Finials and 5 Ridge Crests in Wood, Cornices and Sections, 
Gables, Plan and Elevation of Area Cover, Ornamental Front Brick Work— with 
Terra Cotta Name Tablet, Frieze, Belts and Panels, Niche in Brick Work for 
Statue, One Story of House in Brick— with tile and ornamental brick and b rick 
cornice, Cornice and Pediment for half of 25-foot Front, Brick Bracket and 
Stone Corbel, Cornice in Terra Cotta or Galvanized Iron, 5 Chimney Tops — with 
plans, Bay Window, Piazza and Exterior Cottage Details, Fire Screen Frames, 
Dining-Room Extension Table, Picture Stand, Library Table, Hall Stand, Hall 
Chair, Dining-Room Chairs, Hanging Toilet Stand, Side Tables, Side Boards, 
Couch, Seats, Wardrobe and Bachelor's Dressing-case, Stand and Wardrobe, 
IV Front Outside Doors — with Sections of Rails, Moulds and Panels, Interior 
Door Trim, Wainscotting, Paneled Ceiling, etc., etc., plainly drawn so as to be 
easily understood and appreciated by the practical man ; also Form of Building 
Contract and a complete illustrated list of the best publications issued on the 
subject of building, compiled as a valuable adviser for students of architecture, 
carpenters, builders and mechanics, as well as the public in general. 

This book bound in paper cover will be sent by mail, postpaid, to any ad- 
dress on receipt of price, $1.00. Address all orders to 

J. S. OGILVIE, Publisher, 

57 Rose Street, New York. 



P. O. Box 2767. 



ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT 
BUILDING A HOUSE? 




If you ere, you ought to buy the new book, Palliser's 
American A rchitecture, or every man a complete builder, 
prepared by Palliser, Palliser & Co., the well known architects. 

There is no f a Builder or any one intending to Build or 
otherwise interested that can afford to be without it. It is a 
practical work and everybody buys it. The best, cheapest and 
most popular work ever issued on building. Nearly four hun- 
dred drawings. A $5 book in size and style, but we have deter- 
mined to make it meet the popular demand, to suit the times, so 
that it can be easily reached by all. 

This book contains 104 pages 11 x 14 inches in size, and con- 
sists of large 9x 12 plate pages giving plans, elevations, per- 
spective views, descriptions, owners' names, actual cost of con- 
struction, no guess work, and instructions How to Build 
70 Cottages, Villas, Double Houses, Brick Block Houses, suitable 
for city suburbs, town and country, houses for the farm and 
workingmen's homes for all sections of the country, and costing 
from $300 to $0,500; also Barns, Stables, School House, Town 
Hall, Churches, and other public buildings, together with speci- 
fications, form of contract and a large amount of information on 
the erection of buildings, selection of site, employment of Archi- 
tects. It is worth $5.00 to any one, but I will send it in paper 
cover by mail postpaid on receipt of $1.00; bound in cloth, $2.00. 

Address all orders to J. £. OGILVIE, Publisher, 
P. O. Box 27G7. * ' 57 Rose St.. New York. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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027 990 262 2 



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